What does the ideal citizen look like in China’s new era? A bottom-up view

ABSTRACT

China has reformed the way it nurtures a generation of citizens for the new era of the Xi administration. School curricula have been reformed and more teachers have been trained to deliver political – ideological education. While the central authorities play a crucial role in forging a vision of the ‘ideal’ citizen from the top down, the enactment of centrally promulgated policies and curricula is complicated. This study explores a bottom-up view from the perspective of a group of university teachers, the institutional actors who socialise young people into ‘ideal’ citizens on the ground. Four themes emerge in the informants’ narratives: ideological commitment, abilities, developing a global outlook, and the influence of traditional culture. The paper concludes with a discussion of the interplay between socialist, traditional, and neoliberal rationalities in the making of Chinese citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• education
• ideology
• discourse
• Chinese culture

Introduction

Research has shown that China’s official political discourse has undergone a transformation in the Xi Jinping era (2012 to present), developing its own political vision and legitimacy discourses (Brown and Bērziņa-Čerenkova 2018; Chen 2023a, 2023b; Guo and Tao 2023; Kubat 2018; Lams 2018; Naftali 2022; Vickers 2022). The Xi administration has inherited the educational goal of cultivating ‘New People’.¹ This term first appeared during the early 1980s, at the start of China’s socio-economic transition (Shi 2019), but it now emphasises preparation of student citizens for China’s new era. Xi’s vision of the new era involves ‘China’s transition to a global superpower’ (Peters 2017, 1299) following the three earlier periods in modern Chinese history – the Republican era, the Maoist era, and the Deng Xiaoping era.

By giving a voice to a group of university teachers, who act as the implementors of educational policies and curricula on the ground, this study adopts a bottom-up approach to explore how an ideal citizen is envisioned in China’s new era. Although attention has been paid to analysing curricular documents (e.g. Chen 2023a, 2023b; Naftali 2022; Vickers 2022), knowledge of the enactment of the vision of an ideal citizen in real-life settings is limited. The main reason for this study’s focus on the voices of university teachers is that they can reveal a more holistic picture of the construction of an ideal citizen in China’s educational reforms. The Xi administration has reshuffled the state education system to institutionalise the party-state’s ideological hegemony across the different educational levels. According to the Chinese State Ministry of Education (CSME), primary education emphasises the cultivation of students’ morality; the junior secondary level stresses their understanding of ideologies, the senior secondary level underscores their political literacy; and university education focuses on strengthening students’ sense of responsibility (Publicity Department of CCP and CSME 2020).

This paper first examines the research context and maps out the main educational changes involved in preparing for the cultivation of an ‘ideal’ citizen. We then examine the theoretical framework for analysing the construction of citizenship and citizenship education in China, including socialist, traditional, and neoliberal rationalities. After the methodology section, we present the main themes that emerged from the informants’ narratives about their understanding of an ideal new-era citizenry. We conclude with a discussion of the complexity of ideological alignment in the enactment of centrally promulgated policies and the national curriculum, and the interplay of different rationalities in the making of citizens in Xi’s new era.

Forging an ‘ideal’ citizenry in the new era: the changing landscape of China’s educational campaign

Education is a primary means by which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) enacts its ideological hegemony, designed to induce the consent of the subjugated and to internalise a domination/subordination relationship (Mahutga and Stepan-Norris 2015). After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the central authorities nationalised schools and proactively used state-run education to cultivate the citizenry in accordance with the party-state’s political vision. A key approach was to establish compulsory, independent subjects throughout the school system, covering primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. These subjects now contain a mosaic of various components, including moral education, political – ideological education, the learning of civics and citizenship, and psychological health and well-being education (Chen 2018, 2023a, 2023b; Chia and Zhao 2023; Kennedy, Fairbrother, and Zhao 2014 ; Law 2011; Tse 2011; Zhao 2010, 2018).

The concept of citizenship has continued to appear in policy directives issued in the Xi era. A notable example is the ‘Implementation Guidelines to Construct Civic Moral Codes in the New Era’ (Xinshidai gongmin daode jianshe shishi gangyao) (CCCCP [Central Committee of Chinese Communist Party] and GOSC [General Office of the State Council] 2019a). These guidelines were originally issued in 2001 (CCCCP 2001) but were updated by the Xi administration in 2019. As expressed by Naftali (2022), while the administration uses legal education in the civics curriculum to gain public legitimacy, it inevitably includes citizenship-related concepts such as democracy and rights. Yet the Xi administration has sought to fuse a socialist ideological framework with traditional Chinese culture in the construction of citizenship values (Xi 2021). For example, Brown and Bērziņa-Čerenkova (2018, 337) argued that the Xi era’s ideological features simultaneously blend ‘socialist heritage’ and ‘Chinese philosophical thinking that stretches back deep into the imperial era’. Those two elements can be observed in two policy directives implemented by the central authorities that aimed to highlight the teaching of ‘Outstanding Chinese Traditional Culture’ (Zhongguo youxiu chuantong wenhua) and ‘Revolutionary Traditions’ (Geming chuantong) in the school curriculum across the various subjects (CSME 2021).

Overall, in the last decade, the Chinese government has launched institutional reforms affecting all levels of education, from primary to tertiary, to further consolidate the party-state’s control of the making of citizens in state education. The first reform was the restructuring of the compulsory curriculum for shaping future citizens. At the primary to junior secondary levels, which are compulsory for Chinese students nationwide, the Xi administration’s reform of the mandatory political – ideological–civic curriculum was rebranded as ‘Morals and Rule of Law’ (Daode yu fazhi; hereafter Morals), accounting for 6–8% of school hours (Publicity Department of CCP and CSME 2020). At the senior secondary level and in university settings (including master’s and doctoral programmes), compulsory courses have also been offered to deepen students’ understanding of the party-state’s ideologies. Moreover, the production of school textbooks has been centralised. Textbook development was decentralised from the 1980s to the beginning of the Xi era, allowing regional publishers to issue their own textbooks based on the national curriculum. In the Xi era, a publisher affiliated with the central authorities has taken charge of producing school textbooks nationwide, particularly books covering subjects closely related to the socialisation of students (Vickers 2022).

The second measure was the mandatory teaching of Xi Jinping Thought. A new curriculum entitled ‘Student Reader of Xi Jinping Thought of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in the New Era’ (Xijinping xinshidai zhongguo tese shehui zhuyi sixiang xuesheng duben; hereafter Student Reader) was mandated nationwide. Four volumes of textbooks have been developed. These were introduced in 2021 and cover levels from primary to senior secondary (Chen 2023a). The teaching of Xi Thought is not confined to the classroom but extends to extracurricular learning experiences in the name of ‘labour education’. The term ‘labour education’ was popularly used in the Maoist era to provide students with experience of working in factories, on farms, and in rural areas. The aim was to raise political awareness of the working class in the new generation, specifically among intellectuals, capitalists, and landlords (Xiang 2023). Whilst this tends to be downplayed in the official discourse of post-Mao society, the return of labour education in Xi’s educational agenda suggests the importance of political-ideological education in both formal and informal education.

The third measure was to establish schools of Marxism studies in higher education institutions to train more personnel in political-ideological education. According to the Chinese authorities, schools of Marxism studies numbered around 100 in 2012 but had significantly increased to 1,440 in 2021 across the different higher education institutions nationwide (CSME 2022a). The central authorities issued a new policy requiring at least one member of staff to teach political – ideological education for every 350 university students (CCCCP and GOSC 2019b), leading to a significant increase in teaching staff in higher education institutions around the country.

In discussing the changing landscape of the Xi administration’s educational campaign, the following section presents a theoretical framework for research on how China practises citizenship education. We also discuss the importance of developing a bottom-up view to understand how educational policies and curricula are enacted.

The theoretical framework

Zhang (2018, 857) argued that the Chinese government uses a combination of facilitative and coercive techniques. The construction of citizenship in this context is negotiated through changing ideological discourses that are designed to blend the socialist, traditional and neoliberal rationalities (Chong, Kennedy, and Cheung 2018; Dauncey 2020; Keane 2001; Guo 2022; Law 2011; Tse 2011). Research on China’s official discourses, particularly that of the school curriculum, has shown how the different rationalities are closely intertwined in the party-state’s forging of an ideal vision of its future citizenry (Ai 2015; Wu 2015). The dominant socialist ideology, ‘Sinicization of Marxism’ or ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’, interprets the capitalist market economy as compatible with socialism and emphasises the reconciliation of socialist ideologies in China’s historical – cultural traditions (Baisotti 2019; Lams 2018). Tse (2011) analysed civics textbooks at secondary level and found that the official curriculum moved beyond a narrow focus on ideological – political indoctrination and incorporated elements related to a broad sense of citizenship, such as individual rights, the market economy and global elements. More recently, Baisotti (2019) argued that the ongoing process of rebranding citizenship education mingles foreign conceptions of citizenship education with the socialist ethos and Confucian heritage.

Yet research has also suggested that tension may exist between the three rationalities, which pull in different directions in the cultivation of citizens (Gao 2018; Keane 2001). Market-driven citizenship, which arises with the development of economic globalisation and the neoliberal market, tends to develop a strong consumer society, which may challenge state power and produce apolitical and isolated citizens (Turner 2017). Over the decades of market reform in the PRC, the authorities have increasingly embraced an approach of neoliberal authoritarian governmentality that governs individuals through market mechanisms and by prescribing the responsibilities of individual citizens (Zhang 2018). Consequently, society at large has witnessed an expansion of self-consciousness under neoliberal conditions and increased demand for individual liberty at the grassroots level (Lin and Trevaskes 2020). The market economy is viewed as fostering individualism, making students self-centred, ‘lacking a sense of responsibility and contribution toward society’, and interfering with the development of strong political and ideological consciousness, as shown in Fairbrother’s (2011, 182) case study of Gansu’s provincial education media. In another study of the media portrayals of Chinese citizens speaking foreign languages, Gao (2018, 557) revealed that the impact of globalisation and the neoliberal economy on the way a citizen’s attributes were imagined in how the Chinese media highlighted individuals’ competencies and dispositions of ‘entrepreneurship, reflexivity and flexibility’. This image differed from what would be expected, given the backdrop of socialist ideologies and traditional Chinese culture, which are keen to promote nationalism, collectivism, and political loyalty (Vickers 2022).

Similar to neoliberal rationality, the rationality of embracing tradition shows a complicated relationship with the hegemonic ideology in citizen making. In the new era, reference to the cultural roots of the new citizenry underpins Xi’s approach to constructing both political legitimacy and a new version of his educational goals (Xi 2021). As Kubat (2018, 48) argued, traditional culture is transformed by the CCP as ‘a functional political asset’ for building legitimacy. Traditional culture provides contextual justifications that underpin claims of China’s particularity given the historical-cultural context (Lams 2018; Peters 2022; Vickers 2022). In his lecture at the 19th National Congress of the CCP, President Xi (2017) set out his policy vision after his initial five-year term saying, ‘Socialist ethos with Chinese characteristics is derived from China’s fine traditional culture, which was born of Chinese civilization and nurtured over more than 5,000 years’ (Section VII). In a recent analysis of the materials used to teach ‘Xi thought’ in schools, Chen (2023a) found a tendency for the culturalisation of policies designed to essentialise and reify Chinese culture and the nation in China’s citizenship education.

While the authorities have attempted to reinvent China’s traditions to build legitimacy, the practice of traditional culture at the grassroots level may challenge the dominant ideologies as a form of social – educational activism (Chau 2011; Wu 2015). Wang (2022) and Zhang (2022) studied the development of private school teaching of traditional Chinese cultures such as Confucianism and Daoism at the grassroots level. Their findings indicated that students’ and parents’ preferences for private schools were driven by their critiques of state education and that traditional culture informed the alternative practices of citizen-making. In those scenarios, China’s rich cultural traditions offer alternative worldviews for students at private schools, facilitating individuals’ exercise of their citizenship rights through educational participation.

In the Chinese context, an ideal vision of the citizenry is primarily produced from the top down, through centrally promulgated policies and the national curriculum. However, implementation may be distorted or resisted at the local level, as a consensus needs to be negotiated between the different actors (Fairbrother 2011; Liu, Zhao, and Starkey 2021; Zhao 2010, 2018). Fairbrother (2011) revealed that market mechanisms and decentralisation of the state education system complicated the implementation of the party-state’s youth socialisation policy. The policy implementation process involves ‘the politics of use’ and local actors are also involved in ‘vision-making’ through producing and developing ‘their own ideas, visions, and programmes’ (Schulte 2018, 626–627). Schulte (2018, 624) used the term ‘ideological alignment’ to refer to the interaction between the ‘central organs of power’ and the actors at the bottom level, namely those who implement and use educational policies and curricula.

Empirical findings on the effects of citizenship education on Chinese youth support the arguments of Fairbrother (2011) and Schulte (2018) regarding the complexity of the enactment process. For example, Ke and Starkey’s (2014) research on Chinese university students’ citizenship practices in both online and offline settings indicated that students’ civic behaviours and values were different in cyber space and in reality. More recently, based on a nationwide survey of civic participation, Hsu and her colleagues (Hsu et al. 2022) found that state-led citizenship education that emphasised loyalty and obedience tended to strongly influence less educated members of society, while the better educated tended to embrace active conceptions of citizenship.

These empirical findings clearly show the complexity of enacting ideological hegemony in the real world and the need to examine the viewpoints of institutional actors on the ground. An ideal citizen is generated by disciplinary structures and the exercise of control by engendering ‘notions of normalcy’ for influencing the subjects’ ‘ways of being’ (Graham 2007, 212). The complicated social structures developed in China’s four decades of socio-economic reforms have nurtured various social classes and a variety of actors (e.g. academics, business sector workers, and non-government officials) who have formed their own different agendas (e.g. Chen 2018; Xu 2018). As the Xi administration consolidates its disciplinary structures and tightens ideological control, how socialist, traditional, and neoliberal rationalities are reconfigured and transformed into practice is a pressing issue in decoding the practice of citizenship in contemporary China. The research question asked in the present study is as follows. How do the implementors of educational policies and curricula at universities understand the ideal citizenry of China’s new era?

Methodology

The data were obtained from a series of one-to-one semi-structured interviews with 15 university teachers. A purposive sampling strategy was adopted for this study. The informants were interviewed to understand their grasp of educational policies and curricula, as the implementors of such policies and curricula, to provide insights into the construction of an ‘ideal’ citizen based on their ‘lived experiences’ (Rapley 2014, 57). We tapped into the network of national academic associations to research moral and political education, locally used terms relevant to citizenship education in the international context. We selected the informants based on their research and/or working experience and their familiarity with the educational directives for adolescents and youngsters, as well as for their interest in the study. The informants taught the different variations of compulsory citizenship-related courses in the Chinese context (including political – ideological education and moral – civic education), and carried out the various administrative duties required to enact educational policy and the curriculum for socialising students in their universities.

Table 1 presents background information on all the informants. Their work experience ranged from three to 28 years. Five had obtained master’s degrees and the remaining 10 held doctoral degrees. Their academic positions ranged from lecturer to full professor. Their universities included the different tiers in China’s hierarchical higher education system, including the top tier (nationally leading universities), second-tier (those provincially governed and funded), and third-tier (city-funded local institutions). The universities were located in both the more socio-economically developed central and eastern regions and the less developed western region (Liu et al. 2017).

Table 1. Demographic profile of the informants (n = 15).

Gender	Male	6
	Female	9
Highest educational degree	Master’s degree	5
	Doctoral degree	10
Having learning experiences in overseas universities	Yes	4
	No	11
Years of work experience	<10 years	8
	10 to 19 years	4
	20 years and over	3
Geographic locations of universities	Western region	7
	Central and eastern regions	8
Tiers of universities	Top tier	2
	Second tier	8
	Third tier	5

The interviews were conducted in 2022. Due to the restrictions engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic, we interviewed each informant separately online, as they were in different parts of China. The interviews each took around one hour. The questions included the informants’ understanding of the educational goals of the new era, their perceptions of the differences between the new educational goal of fashioning ‘New People’ and previous goals, the reforms’ relevance to citizenship education, and the influence of traditional Chinese cultures on the development of the educational goals. The interviews were conducted in Chinese and the extracts quoted below are Chinese translations.

Analysis of the interview data focused on the meanings of the informants’ accounts of their experiences as institutional actors. We used coding, condensation, and interpretation to discover the central themes; nevertheless, we are aware that knowledge is gained through interviews between researchers and informants, while meanings undergo construction and reconstruction in that setting (Brinkmann and Kvale 2018). To deepen our understanding of how citizenship education takes place, we used another two sources of documents to triangulate the interview data. The first was a series of educational directives issued by the central authorities under Xi’s leadership between 2012 and 2023. Those outlined the goals and guidelines for nurturing China’s new generation of citizens. The second source was a collection of the national curriculum documents related to citizenship education in the new era that specify the educational goals of policy directives (CSME 2017, 2022b). We also used four volumes of the textbook for Student Reader, a new subject made mandatory nationwide in 2021 to help students understand Xi Thought (Chen 2023a).

Findings

The main themes that emerged from the interview data were four attributes of the informants’ understanding of an ideal citizen. These were ideological commitment, abilities, developing a global mindset, and the influence of traditional culture. The informants tended to hold similar views on the first two attributes but differed on the second two.

Ideological commitment

The informants were unanimous in reporting the primary role held by understanding of the party-state’s ideological values in becoming an ideal Chinese citizen. Below is a narrative from Informant 11, who had 14 years of working experience and served as a professor at a second-tier university in western China. Asked what kind of person is most desired in the new era, he summarised the criteria based on his perceptions as an implementor of educational policies and curricula, while also incorporating his own thoughts. He depicted the goal as nurturing ‘a mature and independent person’.

I think that from the state’s perspective, the first thing is to cultivate young people to love the CCP, love the country and love socialism. This is a primary goal as China is a socialist country. Second, youngsters should acquire moral virtues, such as being aware of equal rights, self-esteem, and self-realization. All these are necessary conditions for a youth to grow into a mature and independent person.

An ‘awareness of equal rights’ as mentioned by Informant 11 above is a citizenship right rather than ‘moral virtues’. This narrative echoes the official discourse, in which the Xi administration has attempted to align morals with the rule of law in constructing the practice of citizenship and citizenship education in the new era. That is clearly visible in policy directives such as the ‘Implementation Guidelines to Construct Civic Moral Codes in the New Era’ (CCCCP and GOSC 2019a), as mentioned above, in which the party-state has attempted to blend socialist ideologies with the moral virtues embedded in traditional culture to construct citizenship values for an ‘ideal’ citizen.

Our analysis of the standards in the national curriculum indicates the importance of upholding the ideologies that underpin citizen-making in China: ‘Understanding Socialist Core Values is the most basic standard for becoming a citizen’ (CSME 2017, 6). Socialist Core Values are a tripartite combination of national values (prosperity, democracy, civility, and harmony), social values (freedom, equality, justice, and the rule of law), and the values of individual citizens (patriotism, professional dedication, integrity, and friendship) (Student Reader, Junior Secondary Level, 29). While acknowledging the individual’s role in civic participation, Socialist Core Values underscore the socialist rationality of dedication to the nation; neoliberal rationality, which relates to prosperity, the rule of law, and professional dedication; and the rationality of embracing traditional Chinese cultural values such as harmony.

Being able to make a practical contribution

Another majority view that emerged from the interview data is that an ‘ideal’ citizen must have the abilities required to make a practical contribution. The informants used different terms to highlight personal abilities that they perceived in the official discourse, such as having strong skills/expertise or talent, or having the creative ability to explore market opportunities. For example, after mentioning the roles of the dominant ideologies, Informant 5 identified the ‘qualities’ or ‘abilities’ that a citizen needs to have:

The connotation of citizenship education is that to be willing to serve the country is not sufficient, you must also have the qualities or abilities to do so. This is the core connotation of citizenship education nowadays.

Informant 5 had more than 20 years’ experience at third-tier universities in eastern China. Based on his teaching and research experience in the development of citizenship education, the informant highlighted that an individual citizen’s abilities are critical to the development of a new-era citizenry. Informant 14, a female teacher with approximately 18 years of experience at a second-tier university in western China, shared a similar vision. Asked about the educational goal of cultivating young people in the new era, she set out her understanding of what is expected of new-era citizens:

My own understanding is that the first thing is to embrace the CCP and the ideology of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and develop a strong sense of national identity and being a Chinese citizen; then secondly, to develop expertise and abilities and have certain ideals in life.

We noticed that several informants mentioned a political slogan widely used in the Maoist era, ‘you hong you zhuan’ (literally ‘both red and expert’, meaning having both the correct political consciousness and ‘professional knowledge and skill’; see Li 1995, 544). Even so, they grasped that personal abilities in particular are highlighted in the new era, as Xi (2017) explained that the younger generation should ‘have ideals, abilities, and a strong sense of responsibility’. We found that the ‘abilities’ in Xi’s narratives were more relevant to the market economy. The Student Reader textbook (Primary Upper Level, 7) explicitly states that new-era citizens should cultivate their abilities to take part in the knowledge economy: ‘In today’s world, knowledge and information are updated rapidly. If you slack off in learning, you will fall behind. The more knowledge we have, the bigger the world will be and the better the future will be’. An emphasis on personal abilities in an ideal vision of citizenry shows the role of neoliberal rationality in the making of new-era citizenry.

Developing a global mindset

There is a tacit tension between consolidating nationalism and cultivating a global mindset in the new era’s policies of citizenship and citizenship education. On the one hand, the official discourse (as clearly shown by the Socialist Core Values discussed above) highlights the importance of the state and its guiding role in society and for individual citizens. Some units in the textbooks of the mandatory subject Morals are designed specifically to strengthen students’ understanding of the state. For example, there are units entitled ‘State Interests Above All’, ‘Constructing Our Beautiful Country!’, ‘Developing an Awareness of National Security’, and ‘Protecting the Interests of the State’. On the other hand, the current administration does not reject China’s global engagement; Xi (2017) claimed that he was building ‘a community with a shared future for mankind’. The administration has also promoted cultural exchanges between the world’s different civilizations. This complexity in the official discourse gives the institutional actors on the ground flexibility in developing their understanding of Sino-Western relations.

In the interviews, the cultivation of global mindedness was sometimes mentioned as an important element of an ideal citizen. For example, Informant 15, a female political education teacher with 26 years of experience at a Western university, when asked about her understanding of the meaning of ‘New People’, said:

As we need to cultivate ‘New People’ with a strong sense of responsibility, I think developing students’ global vision and a sound understanding of China’s national conditions could also be further improved A global mindset will help students to make sense of the local context.

Additionally, we identified two sets of reasons why learning about the non-Chinese world are important in becoming an ideal citizen. In the first set, the informants highlighted both China’s distinctiveness from the West and competition in Sino-Western encounters. For example, when asked about the meaning of citizenship in the contemporary Chinese context, Informant 11, whose background is presented above, stated that:

In our socialist country, we promote collectivism and dedication. Individuals should subject themselves to the community’s needs. That makes our context different from the West.

In contrast, the second set of reasons highlighted the importance of nurturing a global vision, given that Chinese students are also members of global society. This view tended to come from informants who specialised in moral education and/or had experience of overseas learning. For example, when asked for her thoughts on the educational goal of cultivating future citizens, Informant 7, who had around five years of teaching and researching moral education at a third-tier university in eastern China, narrated:

I think we should give children more opportunities to compare and explore without the restrictions of national borders. Based on the vision of ‘a community with a shared future for mankind’, we discuss morality, justice, culture, and what kind of person our country needs to cultivate. We need to view that person as member of humanity.

In her view, Chinese students should learn cosmopolitan values, such as respecting diversity and contributing to human well-being.

The role of traditional culture

The final theme in the interview data concerned the roles of traditional culture in forging an ideal citizen, as all the informants clearly perceived that in recent years the government wanted to promote China’s cultural traditions. Even so, a small number of informants expressed doubt about the exact meaning of traditional culture given China’s rich, dynamic traditions. Most of the informants said that traditional culture had some visible role in their lives, but underlined that their importance lay primarily in enriching individuals’ spirituality.

When asked how Chinese traditions influenced the nurturing of young citizens, around a third of the informants said that they did not clearly understand the connotation of ‘traditional culture’. For example, Informant 11, who, as mentioned above, was an experienced teacher, stated that what students learned about traditional culture in schools was both disorganised and extensive, and included Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, Legalism and other elements. He viewed the party-state’s promotion of traditional culture as being designed to make students more patriotic, but also as a sign it was still unclear how to incorporate traditional culture into the dominant ideology and citizenship education.

There are two issues that need to be addressed theoretically: the first is to reconcile the relationship between traditional culture and Marxist ideology; the second is their relevance to modern society, as some elements of traditional culture are not compatible with modern values.

Similarly, our analysis of the national curriculum standards in Morals, which provides the state-defined meaning of ‘traditional culture’, also shows that the term tends to be rather loosely defined, with a broad scope. According to the curriculum, ‘outstanding traditional Chinese cultures’ consist of ‘core ideas, traditional Chinese virtues, and Chinese humanistic spirit’ (CSME 2017, 92). This includes different philosophical and religious traditions, namely Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, a variety of cultural practices from Han and non-Han minorities, and folk practices. The interview data and our analysis of the curriculum documentation show the pluralism and dynamism of cultural traditions in China.

While a minority of the informants were doubtful about the role of traditional culture, most talked about the ways in which traditional culture can enrich an individual’s spirituality, using diverse terms such as ‘spiritual world’, ‘inner life’, and ‘soul’. For example, when asked about the possible roles that traditional culture could play, Informant 7, a moral educator as mentioned above, explained:

Compared with their counterparts in the past, students nowadays strike me as being more individualistic, emphasising self-agency in making decisions or judgements. They seem to care less about others’ opinions; instead they attempt to develop their own value systems. I think that is closer to human nature. For me, traditional culture is a mosaic of different things including moral education, values, or culture. Whatever it is, students can learn something from them about how to lead a life.

In the informant’s narratives, spiritual development is important as it is the foundation for students’ understanding of the cores of citizenship, such as social justice, ideals, humanity, morality, and identity. Lee (2004, 287) construed spirituality as ‘the enrichment of one’s inner being’, which is conducive to raising individual agency. According to Lee (2004), while citizenship in the West tends to focus on rights and responsibilities, in Asian cultures citizenship is construed as being relevant to spirituality, which is deeply rooted in the different cultural traditions in the region. Despite the authorities’ efforts to mingle the rationalities of socialism and the embrace of traditionality in official discourse in an attempt to build legitimacy (Chen 2023a; Lin and Trevaskes 2020; Xu 2018), the informants perceived political-ideological ideologies as differing from committing to a spiritual life in nurturing citizens.

Discussion and conclusion

Chen (2023b, 12) argued that the Xi administration’s citizenship policies seek to ‘subjugate people by individuating and subjectivising a verifiable feeling of certainty about the future’ by cultivating a political imaginary of political-cultural self-confidence. That suggests an important imperative when exploring the construction of subjectivity among the actors in China’s ideological hegemony. Analyses of the Xi era’s ideology have depended primarily on documentary analysis, including of policies, media narratives, publications by Chinese scholars, and school textbooks (e.g. Brown and Bērziņa-Čerenkova 2018; Chen 2023a, 2023b; Kubat 2018; Lams 2018; Lin and Trevaskes 2020; Naftali 2022; Xu 2018; Vickers 2022). These have rarely taken direct account of the involvement of the actors within the state apparatus inside China. The present study gives voice to the ‘institutional actors’, those involved in enacting the centrally-promulgated educational policies and curricula. It develops a more nuanced understanding of citizenship practice in the ongoing social-political changes in Xi-era China. While the Xi administration consolidates control by reforming the curriculum and enrolling more people in political-ideological education, complexity emerges in the ideological alignment between the state apparatus and the actors on the ground in negotiating and forging a consensus on education for citizenship (Fairbrother 2011; Schulte 2018). In the processes of implementing and using centrally promulgated policy directives and curricula, they attempted to give meaning to their practice (Apple 2018) and developed a reinterpretation of the party-state’s ideological campaign.

The findings of this study reveal how the Chinese government’s embrace of ‘neoliberal authoritarian citizenship’ (Zhang 2018, 857) has shaped its educational goals and produced the image of an ideal citizen. In Xi’s new era, China has continued to embrace economic liberalism as it aspires to trade with the international community (Chong, Kennedy, and Cheung 2018; Peters 2017, 2022). There was considerable consensus among the informants on the importance of socialist ideologies in shaping an ideal citizen’s role in China, and most noted the tendency to link an individual’s abilities to citizenship status. The interview data suggest that a market-driven conception of citizenship is emerging, forging a hegemony in a practice of citizenship that is based on elitism. This conception circumvents the core values of citizenship in promoting social inclusion and fostering full participation (Dauncey 2020). Studies have revealed the household registration (hukou) system-based hierarchies of Chinese citizenship regimes (Zhang 2018) and the ableism that reinforces a dichotomy of normal versus disabled people (Dauncey 2020). The present study reveals that the state’s approach to citizenship is infused with neo-liberal hegemony while embedding an ideological commitment in constructing a citizen’s identity and roles.

The group of informants held some conflicting views about developing global mindedness and the influence of traditional culture on citizen-making. International researchers have observed that the Xi administration has developed a political vision that challenges the Western model of government and communicates ‘a model of best-practice governance that offers a clear alternative to the Western-liberal model of governmental accountability’ to Chinese citizens (Lin and Trevaskes 2020, 123). However, the party-state does not seem to reject universal values; instead, it claims to seek harmony between different civilisations (Kubat 2018; Peters 2022). In this sense, the Xi administration creates a dilemma as it reaches for balance between ‘universalism’ and ‘particularism’ in constructing the worldview of an ideal citizen (Lams 2018). Against this background, the party-state’s use of traditional culture is primarily intended to win public consensus and gain legitimacy from different actors (Kubat 2018; Vickers 2022). Our informants noted that China’s uniqueness, articulated in the official discourse in terms of the distinctiveness of Chinese civilisation and the heritage of traditional culture, tends to feature in citizen-making. Even so, they showed different understandings of Sino-Western relations and differed in how they reconciled national membership and the imperative of developing a global mindset. They negotiated between prescribing an exclusive construct of ethno-national belonging and developing a cosmopolitan worldview in their ideal vision of China’s new era citizenry.

Finally, based on the interview data, we argue that embracing traditionality shows the potential to dismantle a state-centred conception of citizenship through searching for the spiritual side of humanity. Compared with the Western context, where the construction of citizenship focuses on rights and responsibilities, Lee (2004) argued that the Asian conception of citizenship is closely related to cultivating individuals’ inner life or spiritual richness. Our informants perceived the dynamics and openness of Chinese cultures and their roles in developing citizens’ spirituality. As noted by Hayhoe (2018), China has never been culturally closed, and interactions between Christianity, Buddhism, and Confucianism have been dynamic and continuous since ancient times. The diverse and dynamic cultural traditions provide knowledge and values that help understand humanity. Whilst the ideological and neoliberal rationalities seldom pay them much attention, teachers view them as important in educating for citizenship. Moreover, while traditional culture is manipulated in an effort to produce patriotic, loyal, and passive citizens subject to the state’s ideological hegemony (Chen 2023b; Vickers 2022), they can also empower the transcending of national and cultural boundaries in defining citizenship.

Given the increasing challenge of conducting fieldwork in researching Chinese citizenship (see also Chen 2023a), our interview data provide a bottom-up view of the tension embedded in the construction of the ideal citizen. To increase the validity of the study, we maximised the variations in the informants’ backgrounds, including their academic backgrounds, years of work experience, whether they had studied overseas, the different tiers of universities they worked for, the socio-economic development of their different regions, and other factors. However, we acknowledge the study’s limitations, given the small sample size. Future research may consider expanding the sample size, in particular in an investigation of the patterns associated with differing views on developing a global vision and attitudes towards traditional culture in citizen-making.

Acknowledgments

The work described in this paper was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. EdUHK 18603820). The author is grateful to Dr. Huaxin Yang for her assistance in the data collection and all the informants who took part in the study.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China [EdUHK 18603820].

Notes

1. At that time, the term ‘New People’ was spelled out in full as ‘Four-Haves New People’. ‘Four Haves’ (siyou) refers to having the ideal of achieving socialist modernisation and having moral integrity, educational experience, and discipline. According to Shi (2019), having discipline means being able to recognise and resist the West’s erroneous ideas and adhering to the four principles proposed by Deng Xiaoping in 1970 (adherence to Socialism, adherence to the dictatorship of the proletariat, adherence to the CCP’s leadership, and adherence to Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought).