Asian Education Podcast Kyushu University UNESCO Chair on Education for Peace, Social Justice and Global Citizenship

This second season of the Asian Education Podcast features conversations with various contributors to a special issue of the journal Comparative Education on the theme of ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’. The special issue is devoted primarily to analysis of peripheralised communities on the geographical margins of China - in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang. But we’re also talking more generally about those who find themselves on China’s social and cultural margins. For example, we have one article in our collection (by Wan Yi and Edward Vickers) that looks at aspects of educational policy and practice relating to rural migrants and their children.

In this first episode, Edward Vickers, co-editor of this special issue is joined by Gairan Pamei for a discussion with Chen Sicong, the special issue’s other co-editor.

As recently as the 1970s, China was governing by a regime that explicitly dismissed many aspects of Chinese traditional culture in the name of ‘revolution’. But today, the same Communist Party regime portrays what is now termed ‘excellent traditional Chinese culture’ as central to its political legitimacy. Chen Sicong’s article for the special issue helps us understand this ideological transformation and its implications for education, and especially for teaching about citizenship.

Sicong writes very critically of the worldwide tendency over recent decades - enthusiastically embraced by many in China - to portray politics as an outgrowth of essentialised ‘cultures’. We begin by discussing why this ‘cultural turn’ has occurred, not just in China but worldwide.

With more specific reference to the Chinese situation, we then discuss why the Communist Party has become significantly keener since the 1990s on associating itself with traditional culture. We examine what aspects of Chinese ‘tradition’ have been selected by the regime for special emphasis, and why. And we ask whether (or how far) the ‘culturalisation of politics’ in China has been influenced by the ‘cultural turn’ in Western public and academic discourse.

The culturalisation of politics in China did not begin under Xi Jinping, but it has significantly intensified since his assumption of the leadership in 2012. We spend some time discussing what has changed under Xi, and the extent to which the Xi era has witnessed a significant ideological break with what came before. Here we reflect on the meaning of ‘socialism’, noting that in Asian contexts (including modern India as well as contemporary China), dominant interpretations of the concept tend to have emphasised a modernising, statist agenda, rather than prioritising the pursuit of social equality.

This leads us into a consideration of the content and meaning of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’, and its representation in China’s school curriculum. How does this draw on or interpret ideas about Chinese culture or tradition? And how is this related to Xi's signature concept, 'The Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation'?

Attempts to associate the Communist Party with a particular vision of Chinese ‘tradition’ inevitably involve a drive to impose a very particular conception of ‘Chinese’ identity. Sicong argues that the idea of 'Chineseness' underpinning the Xi Jinping Thought curriculum conflates cultural with racial identity. He stresses that grasping the relationship between culture, race and national identity is key to understanding official and popular discourse on nationhood and nationalism in China today.

We briefly consider what the culturalisation of politics in China today implies for the management of relations between the dominant Han population of urban, 'Inner China', and peripheralised regions or peoples. This is a question that is central to many of the papers in the Comparative Education special issue, and one to which we will return in subsequent episodes of the pod

Continuing our series on ‘the politics of education on China’s periphery’, in this episode Ed and Gairan interview Yan Fei, who co-authored a paper for the Comparative Education special issue (60.1) on ‘shifting state policies and the curricular portrayal of China’s minority nationalities’. Dr. Yan has researched the changing depiction of non-Han groups in China’s history textbooks during the entirety of the period of Communist rule, since 1949. In this latest work, co-authored with Edward Vickers, he brings this story up-to-date by examining developments during the Xi Jinping era since 2012.

We begin our discussion by reviewing the earlier history of the curricular treatment of China’s non-Han ‘minorities’. One issue that emerges is the persistent salience of ‘class struggle’ and historical materialism in framing narratives of ‘minority’ history in the late 20th century, even after narratives of the broader Chinese past had begun to embrace (Han) ‘tradition’ and rehabilitate elite ‘patriots’ from China’s past. This reflects a longstanding CCP strategy of emphasising the economic and developmental benefits that ‘minorities’ have enjoyed as a result of Communist rule, and contrasting these with the ‘bad old days’ of pre-revolutionary rule by ‘ethnic’ elites.

However, as is also discussed in our interview with James Leibold and Tenjin Dorjee (Series Two, Episode Three), since the early 2000s there has been a significant shift in official policy on the teaching and portrayal of ‘minority’ cultures and languages. Unrest in Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009 fuelled anxiety over the loyalty of Tibetans and Uyghurs, and caused many Han officials and scholars to question a belief that economic development would gradually reconcile such groups to Chinese rule. This is the context for a tightening of various aspects of ‘minority’ policy, including the treatment of non-Han groups in the school curriculum.

2017 witnessed a major restructuring of the school curriculum and of the curriculum development process itself, reversing a process of decentralisation (albeit tentative and limited) that had been launched in 2001-2. This involved recentralising production of textbooks under the auspices of the People’s Education Press (PEP) in Beijing, as well as a significant tightening of the censorship process. PEP now publishes the history textbooks used in schools throughout China (with the exception of Hong Kong).

One question that arises here is the effectiveness of schooling and school textbooks in shaping popular understanding of the past, especially in an era of pervasive digital technology and widespread use of social media (especially amongst the young). Dr. Yan suggests that more research is needed into such matters. But in China, the extent of CCP control over social media and the internet means that information available through these sources may not significantly diverge from what is presented in school textbooks or public museums. If anything, social media discourse will tend to exaggerate or magnify nationalistic messages that are expressed more blandly in textbooks and other official sources. At the same time, the relationship between official historical and popular discourse is not simply one-way; to effectively shape or manipulate mainstream opinion (at least amongst educated, Han urbanites), the Party may need to work with the grain of folk memory.

Although the Xi era has witnessed significant changes in curricular content and the curriculum development process, has there been a real rupture with what came before? Fei suggests that what we have seen under Xi in many respects represents an intensification of trends already underway before 2012. He explains the talk (dating back to just before Xi’s accession to the leadership) of a need for a ‘second generation ethnic policy’. In the aftermath of the unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang, a number of Chinese commentat

The special issue of Comparative Education on ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’ (issue 60.1, 2024) features an article by Tianlong Yu and Zhenzhou Zhao on ‘Confucianism in Multicultural China’. In this episode of the Asian Education Podcast, Edward
Vickers talks to Tianlong about his work with Zhenzhou on this article, and also more generally about the resurgence of popular and official interest in Confucianism in contemporary China.

Ed and Tianlong begin by discussing the meaning of the term ‘Confucianism’. While they note the diversity of interpretations of this school of thought - both in the past and present - they highlight several key features, namely an emphasis on self-cultivation; the importance of social and political order; the observance of propriety in one’s personal relationships (seen as essential to maintaining order); hierarchy; and patriarchy.

They then reflect on the reasons for the revival of interest in Confucianism on the Chinese mainland since a low point for the sage’s reputation in the 1970s, when the Cultural Revolution witnessed a campaign to ‘Criticise Lin Biao and Confucius’. Tianlong argues that renewed popular interest in Confucianism during the 1980s and 1990s can be explained largely as a reaction to the anxieties and disorientation experienced by many ordinary people during a period of rapid social and cultural change. But he distinguishes this popular movement from the attempts by the Communist Party (CCP) to deploy Confucianism in attempts to shore up its authority, especially after the unrest of 1989 and subsequent collapse of the Soviet bloc. The CCP’s embrace of Confucianism has been highly selective, as it has co-opted a highly selective, conservative-authoritarian interpretation of Confucian thought.

It is this version of Confucianism that, under Xi Jinping, has been folded into the notion of ‘outstanding traditional Chinese culture’. As China’s economy has stuttered and the CCP’s ability to invoke performance legitimacy has consequently waned, a conservative, authoritarian and monolithic vision of ‘Chineseness’ has become increasingly central to the regime’s ideological narrative. At the same time, however, the scope for popular debate over Confucianism or for non-state Confucian activism has significantly narrowed.

In their article, Tianlong and Zhenzhou analyse the treatment of Confucian ideas in school textbooks, showing how these promote a largely Han-centric vision of ‘Chineseness’ and portray Confucianism as central to a historical civilising mission directed at non-Han groups around China’s periphery. As other articles in the special issue also argue (e.g. Yan and Vickers 2023; Bulag 2023), textbook narratives assume a teleology of assimilation, with non-Han people’s inevitably drawn to adopt or conform to the ‘superior’ culture of the Han, with Confucianism at its core.

Tianlong and Zhenzhou sought to investigate the reception of such messages by students from ‘minority’ backgrounds - both from non-Han minzu (or ‘minority nationalities’) and from religious communities. Amongst these informants, they found significant resistance to curricular messages. Although the Party sees Confucianism as useful for establishing a moral and cultural hierarchy that legitimises the social and political status quo, young Chinese from 'minority' backgrounds do not seem to find this messaging particularly convincing or persuasive. This suggests that the CCP's embrace of a conservative, authoritarian brand of Confucianism may actually be counterproductive in terms of the Party's own aims.

The research on which this article is based was conducted in around 2016-2017, just as the government was preparing to strengthen central control over the more politically sensitive school subjects (Chinese language, history, morals, politics), and issue new textbooks. The intervening years have also seen a significant intensificatio

Continuing our series on ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’, featuring authors of articles in the related special issue of Comparative Education, in this episode Edward Vickers interviews James Leibold and Tendor Dorjee, co-authors of an article on boarding schools for Tibetan students in contemporary China.

We begin by discussing the origins on the boarding school program for Tibetans, which originated in the 1980s and was at first aimed at a relatively narrow elite. From the beginning, alumni of these ‘inland’ schools reported experiencing significant cultural and linguistic loss, and confusion in terms of their own identities. But for some, at least in these early years, this schooling became a route to relatively high-status and lucrative employment.

In their special issue article, James and Tendor argue that the past decade or so has seen an intensification of efforts to use education to enforce the assimilation of minority nationalities in China. In discussing the origins and implications of this shift, we note that it has happened in the context of a wider ramping up of the standardisation of education across China, in an attempt to universalise a homogenous, totalising model of urban (male) Han modernity. It is important to remember that this has been directed not only at non-Han ‘minorities’, but also at rural Chinese (both Han and non-Han) in general. But with respect to non-Han communities, especially those in western regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang, this programme of cultural homogenisation assumes a particular edge.

We note that, until the early 2000s, there were alternate educational options available at least to some Tibetans - of travelling to exiled Tibetan communities in India to study in boarding institutions there, or attendance in private or monastic schools inside of Tibet. But since 2006, that route to India has been closed off, just as the enrolment of Tibetans into Chinese boarding schools has been expanded and non-state schools were shuttered across the Tibetan plateau.

That shift has coincided with a gradual shift from the relative cultural openness of the 1980s and 1990s in China towards the brutally assimilatory emphasis of current policy, allied to an expanding and ever more sophisticated apparatus of monitoring and surveillance. As James explains, the CCP has always sought to use education as a tool of ideological and political control, but in the eyes of the leadership, several key events have appeared to raise the stakes, including: the Student Movement of 1989; the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; the Tibet and Xinjiang unrest of 2008 and 2009; and the advent of Xi Jinping’s ‘New Era’ after 2012. Although the CCP has always maintained assimilation as the ultimate goal of its ethnic policy, the perceived urgency of that goal, and the strategies seen as necessary to its fulfilment, have significantly altered over the past two decades as the CCP adopted a more interventionalist approach to state-society governance.

As we discuss, part of this shift is attributable to a declining faith in the power of economic growth to drive assimilation, by persuading ‘minorities’ of the benefits to be gained by ever-closer union with the Han. That loss of faith in (neoliberal) economics has coincided with the declining allure of the West as an economic (and possibly political) model, since the global financial crisis of 2008-9. This is the context in which the regime has shifted to a far more forceful approach to assimilation through education.

A concept central to this assimilatory programme is the Zhonghua minzu. In their article, James and Tendor write of how the concept of the 'Zhonghua minzu', or the Chinese 'race-nation' as they gloss it, has been interpreted in increasingly homogenous and totalising terms as it has assumed greater prominence in CCP propaganda in recent years. Increasingly under Xi Jinping, the ‘nation-race’ encompassed by the Zho

In this episode, recorded in December 2023, Ed talks to Queenie Lam of Trier University (Germany) and Y-Europe about the issue of academic freedom in China, specifically as it relates to Hong Kong. Dr. Lam grew up in Hong Kong, but has family roots in mainland China (Fujian) and South East Asia (the Philippines and Indonesia). She worked from 2010 until 2022 at the Academic Cooperation Association in Brussels, having previously worked at various academic and administrative units of The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Our conversation ranges across various problems and issues affecting academic freedom both within China and beyond. We discuss Hong Kong’s National Security Law of 2020 (NSL) and its educational implications, reflecting on how dramatic the consequent changes in Hong Kong’s educational climate have been. After some discussion of the implications for schooling - based on our own experience teaching and studying in Hong Kong - we focus especially on the implications of the ‘securitisation’ of education for teaching and research in universities. Drawing on contributions to an October 2023 workshop at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, we discuss what the NSL has meant for academia in Hong Kong, touching on the case of Rowena He (He Xiaoqing), a researcher on contemporary Chinese politics who lost her job at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the autumn of 2023, and ending with some discussion of freedom of speech issues in other countries affected by the extraterritoriality of Hong Kong’s NSL.

Although our main focus is on Hong Kong, we also discuss challenges to academic freedom in the field of China Studies in the West. We reflect on some of the pressures faced by China scholars today (whether they are Chinese nationals or foreigners), and some of the factors that may account for persistent failure by many to acknowledge the severity of the situation facing scholars and educators in Hong Kong, let alone the Chinese mainland.


Suggested Readings:


Edward Vickers. 2023. “The Motherland’s Suffocating Embrace: Schooling and Public Discourse on Hong Kong Identity Under the National Security Law.” Comparative Education 60 (1). https://doi-org.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/10.1080/03050068.2023.2212351.
Baehr, P. 2022. “Hong Kong Universities in the Shadow of the National Security Law.” Society 59: 225–239. https://doi-org.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/10.1007/s12115-022-00709-9.

In this episode of our series on ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’, we discuss a little-known entity perhaps only peripherally related to education, but central to the shifting politics of identity in contemporary Taiwan: the ‘Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission’ (蒙藏委員會) (MTAC).

In her doctoral research, Alessandra Ferrer examined the changing role of the MTAC following the retreat of the Republic of China (ROC) to Taiwan in 1949. During the period of Martial Law under the KMT, the Commission’s function was primarily propagandistic, its very existence serving to remind ROC citizens and the wider world of the claims of ‘Free China’ to sovereignty over the entirety of Chinese territory, with ‘China’ defined as encompassing both Tibet and the whole of Mongolian (including that of the independent Mongolian People’s Republic).

In this interview, we begin by reviewing the origins and purpose of the MTAC on the Chinese mainland, when the MTAC was tasked with both with asserting China’s claims to governance over Tibet and Mongolia and, as far as possible, extending and embedding actual Chinese influence in these regions. Alessandra also explains how the Commission’s origins can be traced to the Qing Dynasty agency for ‘managing barbarians’, the Li Fan Yuan (理藩院).

Following defeat in the Chinese Civil War of the late 1940s, the KMT retreated to Taiwan, but continued to assert its rightful authority over the Chinese mainland, including Tibet and Mongolia. This meant maintaining all the institutions of the Republican regime, including the MTAC.

In her article for the Comparative Education special issue, Alessandra analyses the treatment of Tibetans and their religion in MTAC literature, and characterises MTAC discourse as an instance of ‘internal orientalism’. In effect, she is drawing a comparison between ROC discourse on the ‘frontier’ regions of Tibet and Mongolia and Western colonial ‘civilising missions’. One key point that emerges from her work relates to the dominance of assumptions of Han cultural or civilisational superiority vis-à-vis Tibet during the Martial Law era. At the same time, ROC officials were keen to highlight instances of CCP brutality and insensitivity in its treatment of ‘minorities’ on the mainland, and to contrast this with the enlightened and beneficent policies proposed by the MTAC.

However, MTAC discourse on Tibet underwent some significant changes during the 1980s and 1990s, as Taiwan itself democratised and the KMT’s Chinese nationalism was increasingly challenged. On the one hand, Taiwanese nationalism drew upon a narrative of a ‘multicultural’ Taiwan that rejected the established emphasis on the island’s monolithic ‘Chineseness’. But at the same time, underlying ideas of what constitutes ‘a nation’, and assumptions of Han Chinese cultural superiority, have remained relatively strong.

Alessandra also comments on how the rapid democratisation of Taiwan from the late 1980s, and the growing challenge to Chinese nationalism, was viewed with apparent alarm by MTAC officials at the time. MTAC literature suggests that officials within the Commission increasingly found themselves more in sympathy with their counterparts on the Communist mainland than with ‘nativist’ opinion on Taiwan itself. This is reflected in a fractious relationship between the MTAC and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile during this period, with some MTAC publications during the 1990s blaming the Dalai Lama for irresponsibly stoking ‘anti-Han sentiment’ among Tibetans. When the Dalai Lama was scheduling a visit to Taiwan in the late 1990s, his aides insisted that the MTAC be excluded from any role in hosting him.

Unsurprisingly, independence-leaning Taiwanese politicians had little interest in maintaining the MTAC. However, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration of President Chen Shui-Bian (2000-2008) was unable to