The culturalisation of politics in contemporary Chinese citizenship education

ABSTRACT

While historically and ideologically peripheralised in modern Chinese politics, traditional culture has been discursively rehabilitated by the Chinese communist regime in recent years. Existing literature on this phenomenon tends to focus on the politicisation of culture, that is, how Chinese culture, particularly the Confucian tradition, is appropriated by the regime to legitimatise and stabilise its ideopolitical control in schools and society. This article draws attention to the interweaving but distinct and underexplored tendency of the culturalisation of politics, that is, the party-state’s discursive construction of politics in culturalist terms. It examines how politics is culturally constructed, or culturalised, in the official textbooks for the guiding political doctrine Xi Jinping Thought, the teaching of which has been mandatory in schools and universities since 2021. Situating the Chinese case in the broader context of the ‘cultural turn’ in postmodern politics, this article discusses the implications for citizenship education under China’s authoritarian regime.

在近现代历史和意识形态上长期处于边缘化的传统文化越来越多地出现在近年的中国官方话语之中。关于这一现象的研究，现有文献大多关注文化的政治化，即中国文化（尤其是儒家传统）是如何被挪用来正当化和巩固针对学校和社会的意识形态控制。本文将焦点转向虽有联系但较少讨论的另一个特点，即政治话语是如何以文化主义的方式建构出来的，简称之政治的文化化。本文以自2021年起成为各级学校必修教材的习近平思想学生读本为例，分析在公民教育中政治是如何被文化化。在后现代政治中的“文化转向”这一更广泛的背景下，本文探讨了中国专制政权下政治的文化化对公民教育的影响。

KEYWORDS:

• Politics
• culture
• culturalisation of politics
• citizenship education
• Xi Jinping Thought
• China

关键词:

• 政治
• 文化
• 政治文化化
• 公民教育
• 习近平思想
• 中国

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Edward Vickers and anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sicong Chen

Sicong Chen is an associate professor at the Department of Education, Kyushu University, Japan. His research interest is citizenship education in East Asian contexts. He is the author of The Meaning of Citizenship in Contemporary Chinese Society: An Empirical Study through Western Lens (2018, Springer).