Citizenship education in Chinese schools

Research in Education, May 2002 by Chen, Yangguang, Reid, Ivan

In schools some specific requirements of citizenship were put forward. While the course offered in various schools continued to be called Character Cultivation, the original content, based on the Confucian classics (a school of thought in the `warring states' period, 770-221 Bc, and developed by a group of philosophers later on), dealing with family relations and, by extension, human relations throughout the whole empire, was replaced with `requirements of citizenship' and `law and regulation system'. It was aimed at serving the newly built national capitalism. However, this modification was soon found not practical enough to meet the need. Hence came demands for further innovation in civics education.

In October 1919 the fifth annual meeting of the National Education Federation was held in Shanxi. The main object was to discuss the compilation of a textbook for use in schools and a guidebook for a nation-wide campaign of moral education for citizenship. As a result the Ren Xu System was promulgated in 1922, which standardised the duration of schooling at six years for primary education, three years for lower secondary education, another three years for upper secondary education and four years for higher education. An Outline of the New Curriculum, issued in 1923, required the replacement of the original course of `Character Cultivation' with `Civics Education' (Chen, 1992). It was the first time schools had offered education for citizenship in a specific course. The course was strongly influenced by Western notions of democracy, which valued individual participation in social affairs. Progressive intellectuals believed that social equality could be achieved only by improving citizens' moral qualities through certain paths of Citizenship Education.

However, this policy soon changed. In 1927 the Kuomingtang (the ancestor of the present ruling party in Taiwan) took power and Citizenship Education began to shift its agenda from being about social equality to maintaining the dictatorship of this new bureaucrat government, which, influenced by Nazism, advocated `one party, one doctrine and one leader'. Accordingly, in August 1929 a Curriculum Criterion for Primary and Secondary Schools was issued, in which the `Civics Education' course was replaced with one entitled `Party Duty'. It emphasised centralised politics, a military monarchy and obedient citizens, but all in the name of nationalism, civil rights and people's livelihood. This course took up 6.7-8.0 per cent of total teaching hours and served only the purposes of the regime (Kuomingdang, 1934). The policy was heavily criticised for its authoritarianism, restoration and capitulation by progressive forces within the party. In 1932 a revised version of the Curriculum Plan was put forward, in which the `Civics Education' course was reintroduced, with some compromise amendments, including:

1 Making explicit for the first time the sequence of teaching tasks in, and the teaching objectives of, the course: