From confident subject to humble citizen: reimagining citizenship education in contemporary China

ABSTRACT

Projecting itself as the inheritor of China’s past greatness, the CCP regime increasingly seeks to boost politico-cultural confidence in education and society and turn students and ordinary people into self-confident Chinese. This article identifies the oscillation of focus from victimhood to confidence in state nationalism and patriotic education and interrogates the politics behind the official push for self-confidence. Through the lens of Foucauldian governmentality and subjectivation, it argues that self-confidence serves as a governing technique for the party-state to subjugate people by individuating and subjectivising a verifiable feeling of certainty about the future, which depends on the CCP, pathologises political grievances, and precludes alternative political imaginaries. To be constructive as well as critical, this article draws upon contemporary political theory to suggest that education for humble citizenship, which centres on contingency, interdependence, and critique of the past and present, is key to citizenship education that strives for desubjugation and autonomy.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship education
• state nationalism
• self-confidence
• governmentality
• subjectivation
• humble citizenship
• China

Introduction: boosting self-confidence

Chinese people seem confident about their country like never before. With a ‘near-universal increase’ in their satisfaction with the government at all levels between 2003 and 2016 (Cunningham, Saich, & Turiel, 2020, p. 2), it is reported that 95% of the people surveyed had confidence in the central government in 2018 (World Values Survey Association, 2018), and even more (98%) after the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic (Wu et al., 2021). The Global Times, a nationalist daily tabloid affiliated with the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s mouthpiece People’s Daily, reported proudly that young Chinese are increasingly confident about China, as more ‘look at the West as equal’ (from 42% to 48%) and, more dramatically, ‘look down on the West’ (from 18% to 42%) in 2021 as compared to five years ago.¹ The reported increase in confidence is consistent with, though might not be entirely attributable to, the CCP regime’s attempt in recent years to boost, in education and the wider society, the political and cultural self-confidence of students and ordinary people and turn them into confident Chinese. Central to the push for confidence is the party-state’s rhetoric of the so-called ‘four self-confidences’ (sige zixin), that is, self-confidence in the Chinese socialist path (daolu), theory (lilun), institution (zhidu) and culture (wenhua). Since its first appearance in the official discourse in 2016, the rhetoric has become a central theme in the party-state’s ideopolitical propaganda and education.²

This article critically examines this official push for self-confidence, a positive attribute seemingly difficult to oppose. How to understand the push as patriotic education? Why self-confidence now? How does self-confidence work in the party-state’s interest? This article takes on these underexplored questions. It identifies the oscillation of focus from victimhood to confidence in contemporary state nationalism and patriotic education. It then interrogates the politics behind the push for self-confidence by seeing self-confidence as a form of governance of self through the lens of Foucauldian governmentality and subjectivation. It argues that self-confidence serves as a governing technique for the party-state to subjugate people by individuating and subjectivising a verifiable feeling of certainty about the future, which depends on the CCP, pathologises political grievances, and precludes alternative political imaginaries.

To be constructive as well as critical, this article also reimagines citizenship education in contemporary China, exploring how to counter the reduction of citizenship education to the production of subjugated, however confident, subject. Bearing in mind the citizen-subject dynamic and drawing upon the revitalised notion of humility in contemporary political theory, this article suggests that education for humble citizenship, which upholds contingency, interdependence, and critique of the past and present as opposed to the certainty, dependence, and confidence in the future characterising the governing technique of self-confidence, is crucial if citizenship education is about educating citizens to challenge, rather than capitulate to, subjugation and to strive for, rather than surrender, autonomy.

The following section will give an account of the complex relationship between citizen and subject by considering the question of self-governance through the lens of Foucauldian governmentality and subjectivation. The third section elaborates on the recent oscillation of Chinese state nationalism from victimhood to confidence in patriotic education, while the fourth section critically interrogates how self-confidence serves as a governing technique in the contemporary Chinese context. After exploring political humility as an alternative to self-confidence in the fifth section, the article concludes by proposing education for humble citizenship as a way of desubjugation towards autonomy.

Complicating citizen and subject: the question of self-governance

Citizenship in Aristotelian terms features citizens ruling over and being ruled by equal fellow citizens, in the sense that ‘citizens join each other in making decisions … and … in obeying the decisions (now known as “laws”) they have made’ (Pocock, 1995, p. 31). Such citizenship is impossible and opposite to subjecthood in an absolute monarchy, or more generally, any authoritarian or undemocratic regime, where a subject is obligated to obey the law made by others without the right to take part in the making of law (Leydet, 2017). In other words, citizen can be distinguished from subject by the participation in the decision-making of a political community to which one belongs, or simply put, by self-determination or self-governance in the sense of governance by self. This characterisation is similar to the Tocquevillian distinction between citizens who are ‘their own masters’ and subjects who are governed by external power and authority (Cruikshank, 1999, p. 19). Almond and Verba (1965) also assert that individuals are competent as citizens by participating in and influencing rulemaking, and as subjects by being aware of and appealing to the rules already made and applied.

Fully self-governing citizenship is, however, an illusionary ideal. It is impracticable and even undesirable for modern citizens to take part in all decision-making in a democracy, mainly due to the heterogeneity and complexity of modern society and citizens’ interests. The professionalisation of politics means that citizens may indirectly participate in governance through periodically voting for representatives in elections, and retaining the right to question and challenge the decisions and rules made by elected politicians. Indeed, Almond and Verba (1965) recognise the necessity of both the citizen’s direct participation in making rules, and their competence in appealing to existing rules in modern democracy. More fundamentally, citizens’ consciousness and capability of self-governance are nothing but made, created and empowered – as Cruikshank (1999) demonstrated with evidence from programmes which promoted self-help and self-esteem for democratic participation in the American context. This suggests that governance by self or autonomy is intertwined with governance by others or subjugation even in a democracy. It is for the reason that ‘citizens are both subjected to power and subjects in their own right’ that Cruikshank (1999) ‘replace[s] the dichotomising slash in citizen/subject with a hyphen: citizen-subject’ (pp. 23–24). The citizen-subject or self-other dynamic in governance can also be observed the other way around from the end of subject/other through the lens of Foucauldian governmentality and subjectivation.

Governmentality is a neologism coined by Michel Foucault to mean the mentality or rationality of government, that is, the ‘art of government’. In the lexicon of Foucault (1991), government as a form of exercising power is distinct from, yet compatible with, sovereignty and discipline, two historically earlier forms. The primary concern of sovereignty is territory and the submission of the ruled who inhabit it through imposition of and obedience to prohibitionary law, while discipline is about managing the ruled through mechanical prescription and regulation. By contrast, government ‘has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security’ (Foucault, 1991, p. 102). Unlike juridical and disciplinary apparatuses that operate by prohibiting and regulating, that is, preventing things from happening, the apparatus of security ‘lets things happen’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 45) and responds to the happenings as reality according to the governing goal. Corresponding to this freedom for things to happen is that government perceives the ruled as population, which is not merely ‘as an object … on which and towards which mechanisms are directed’ but also ‘a subject, since it is called upon to conduct itself’ (pp. 42–43). In other words, to govern ‘is to structure the possible field of action of others’ (Foucault, 1982, p. 790). It is in this sense that Foucauldian government is often tersely described as ‘the conduct of conduct’. Dean (2010) interprets this as ‘any attempt to shape with some degree of deliberation aspects of our behaviour according to particular sets of norms and for a variety of ends’ (p. 18). Significantly, defining government as the conduct of conduct ‘open[s] up the examination of self-government … a way in which an individual questions his or her own conduct (or problematises it) so that he or she may be better able to govern it’ (Dean, 2010, p. 19). Foucault (1993) indeed considers government as the meeting point for governing others and governing oneself:

The contact point, where the individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we can call, I think, government. Governing people, in the broad meaning of the word, governing people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified himself [sic]. (pp. 203–204)

As a form of governing others, government entails intimate concern and regulatory control over the individual self – a part of the population – in everyday life and thus exercises power in ‘simultaneous individualisation and totalisation’ (Foucault, 1982, p. 785). This is what government shares with but where it departs from discipline. Unlike discipline in which power is exercised as ‘an “objectivizing” force … [that transforms] individuals into objects or docile bodies’, power works as ‘a “subjectivizing” force’ in governmentality (McNay, 1994, p. 122). That is, government features subjectivation, which turns an individual into subject in the two senses of the word, ‘subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his [sic] own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge’ (Foucault, 1982, p. 781). Subjectivation in the Foucauldian sense thus paradoxically means both the subjugation to the will of others and the becoming of a subject able to act at one’s own will. In short, a subject is both ‘actor and sufferer’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 184), simultaneously embodying both subordination and agency (Butler, 1997, pp. 12–18).

Given that it counts on individuals to turn her/himself into a subject, that is, on the action of the governed to realise governing goals, Foucauldian governmentality ‘always presumes the existence of a degree of freedom’ (Walters, 2012, p. 12) in the thinking and acting of the governed. In the words of Foucault (1982), freedom is ‘the condition for the exercise of power’ and even the ‘precondition’ for power to be exercised, because ‘power would be equivalent to a physical determination’ without ‘the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom’ on the part of the subject (p. 790). The condition of freedom as action and the precondition of freedom as resistance enable counter-conduct and activate the interplay between freedom and power, rendering the governing outcomes, effects and consequences ‘relatively unpredictable’ (Dean, 2010, p. 18).

Foucauldian governmentality concerns itself ‘principally’ (Gordon, 1991, p. 3) with the power relation between state and citizen in the political domain, or more precisely, the governing rationalities and techniques through which a citizenry is created to support and achieve governing goals in modern (neo-)liberal democracy. As Hindess (1996) discusses, governmentality challenges (neo-)liberalism, which presumes or naturalises individual liberty or autonomy, by empirically unearthing the direct and dynamic governmental interventions into the population and the consequent ‘artefactual mechanisms that produce and sustain whatever habits and forms of autonomy members of the population actually enjoy’ (p. 77). If Foucauldian governmentality exposes the subjugating elements in democracy, that is, the complication of governance by others in the governance by self, then it also brings attention to the function of subjectivation as a more covert, dispersive and permeative governing technique than disciplinary coercion and oppression for authoritarian regime, that is, the activation of the self in authoritarian governance. To put it another way, the self is subjugated by being made willing and able to act in accordance with authoritarian rules. In short, while citizens may be subjugated for autonomy, the subject may be autonomised for subjugation.

There is indeed more and more research taking up the perspective of Foucauldian governmentality to identify the subjectivising elements in the Chinese authoritarian regime, so much so that ‘to describe Chinese government as either “socialist” or “neoliberal” is misleading’ (Jeffreys & Sigley, 2009, p. 13). Subjectivation is also reported in the Chinese party-state’s governance of education. For instance, Woronov (2009) documented the ways in which urban Chinese children are taught under the control and management of state agents ‘to become experts of themselves’ with ‘creativity, initiative, and entrepreneurialism … [that can] produce the highest value on the global labour market’ to serve the party-state’s interest (p. 585). As a complement to this scholarship, this article interrogates the politics behind the push for self-confidence, arguing that self-confidence is the party-state’s another governing technique to make people support the regime, that is, to maintain regime legitimacy, which increasingly relies on nationalist rationalities.

Contemporary Chinese state nationalism: from victimhood to confidence

While nationalism and communism, one appealing to the nation and the other to the proletariat, may be conceptually incompatible, they could be simultaneously espoused in real struggles and movements, as witnessed in modern world history (Hobsbawm, 1992). Indeed, the CCP established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 in the name of communist revolution and nationalist unification, with the latter bearing ‘a strong statist tinge’:

State nationalism in the PRC portrayed the communist state as the embodiment of the nation’s will. The communist state sought the loyalty and support of the people that had been granted to the nation itself and tried to create a sense of nationhood among all its citizens by speaking in the nation’s name and demanding that citizens subordinate their interests to those of the state. (Zhao, 2004, p. 28)

Although socialism-communism remains enshrined as the state ideology in the Chinese constitution, public faith in it has waned in contemporary China after a series of historical events in the second half of the twentieth century. They include, notably, the political and socioeconomic turbulences caused by the class struggles and cultural revolution between the 1950s and 1970s; the shift of policy focus from communist ideology to economic development since the 1980s; and the party-state’s suppression of democratic movements, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War at the turn of the 1990s. In the face of declining public interest in socialism-communism, nationalism, as Zhao (2004) discusses, was ‘rediscovered’ by the party-state in the early 1990s to serve as an ‘instrument’ to maintain ruling legitimacy (p. 209). It is widely observed (e.g. Carlson, 2009) that state nationalism since then featured a grand historical narrative that posited the CCP as the capable protector and legitimate ruler of the Chinese nation, a nation possessing cultural greatness and even superiority, but suffering enormous damage and losses under foreign powers in the past centuries.

At the centre of the rediscovered state nationalism is the party-state’s campaign for patriotic education primarily targeting young people. Formally initiated by the Implementation Outline of Patriotic Education issued by the CCP Central Committee in 1994, the campaign called for incorporating patriotic education into all levels of education from kindergarten to university and turning various public places, from museums to natural parks, into patriotic education bases. Wang (2012), among others, observed a victor-to-victim change in the official narrative of Chinese history in the campaign. Unlike the educational emphasis in the Maoist era (1949–1976) on the national victory over foreign invaders (Japan in particular) in the Second World War and on the communist victory over the Nationalist Party in the civil war, the patriotic education campaign highlighted China’s humiliating and traumatic experiences at the hands of foreign oppressors. This move is seen as an attempt to alienate Chinese youth from liberal democracies cast as China’s old enemies and make them appreciative of the CCP as the saviour of China from national humiliation (Wang, 2012).

If national victimhood marked the discourse of state nationalism in the 1990s and 2000s, then the discursive focus seems to change again after 2012 when Xi Jinping took power, this time from national victimhood to national confidence. This is reflected in the discursive changes between the 1994 outline and its 2019 revision entitled Implementation Outline of Patriotic Education in the New Era. Both outlines specify the substance of patriotic education, in which history education is given a central role. The 1994 outline accentuated modern history education as the venue to show how Chinese people ‘resisted foreign aggression and oppression’ and ‘struggled for national independence and liberation’. These lines disappeared in the 2019 outline, which instead gives prominence to the more recent reform and opening-up era, highlighting the economic and social achievements under the CCP’s leadership in ‘realising national rejuvenation’. It is on the grounds of socioeconomic accomplishments in recent decades that the revised outline takes up the rhetoric of ‘four self-confidences’ and sets the aim of educating people to be self-confident about Chinese socialism and culture. National self-confidence is indeed a new addition alongside national self-esteem and pride mentioned in the original and reiterated in the revised outlines.

The relationship between socialism and culture in the push for confidence deserves further observation. Chinese traditional culture is taken as an integral component of patriotic education since the 1994 outline. However, the 2019 outline unprecedentedly describes traditional culture as the ‘cultural gene’ (wenhua jiyin) of Chinese people, a metaphor smacking of cultural essentialism and determinism. It rhetorically resonates with another newly added term ‘red gene’ (hongse jiyin), a recent entry in the Chinese political lexicon to indicate the socialist revolutionary spirit that Chinese people are instructed to take on.³ Indeed, communists are presented as national heroes inheriting Chinese traditional values and their stories as classics on Chinese virtues in the exclusive official moral education textbooks used nationwide since 2017 (Chia & Chen, 2022). By connecting socialist ideology to the Chinese past, these discursive figuration and correlation cast a light of historical and cultural lineage on it and project the CCP as, in the words of Perry (2017), ‘part and parcel of a glorious “Chinese tradition”’ (p. 29, emphasis added). This is historically paradoxical and ironic, given the party-state’s determination to eradicate Chinese traditional culture during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). It is also arguably more overt, assertive and ambitious than the attempts taken in the patriotic education campaign under the 1994 outline, which, as Zhao (2004) discusses, tried to justify the socialist rule ‘on the basis of Chinese tradition and culture’ by simplifying Chinese history as a history of patriotism and disguising socialism as patriotism (p. 227, emphasis added). This observation of socialism being restored and reinterpreted as Chinese culture in education (Chen, 2023) corresponds to Miao’s (2020) finding that socialist and traditional values are blended in recent propaganda campaigns in the wider society, which led her to argue that the CCP now places itself in the role of ‘the inheritor of China’s cultural heritage’ (p. 181). The earlier ‘wounded nationalism’ (Chang, 2001), which set the CCP as the protector from national humiliation, seems to be superseded by what may be called confident nationalism, which projects the CCP as the inheritor of the past greatness of China and pushes students and ordinary people for politico-cultural confidence. Boosting confidence has been institutionalised in education, taking a primary place in citizenship or ideopolitical curricula and permeating into all subjects and levels of education from primary to tertiary.⁴ As demonstrated in the 2019 outline, the self-confidence rhetoric is closely associated with national achievement narratives. With the party-state’s simplification of national development as legible outcome (Gonzalez-Vicente, 2022), any visible, measurable developments, from socioeconomic to cultural and technological, might be appropriated to boost national confidence; and vice versa, self-confidence as a verifiable, demonstrable attribute (explained in the next section) might itself become a national development narrative. ⁵ In short, the CCP seems to set in motion what Callahan (2010) called the ‘pessoptimist’ Chinese nation, which interweaves pessimistic national humiliation and optimistic national pride, to oscillate to the optimistic end in the regime legitimation combining socialist ideology and traditional culture since the 2010s.

Why self-confidence now? How does self-confidence work to make people support the CCP regime in the contemporary context? The next section proceeds to interrogate the politics behind the push for self-confidence by seeing it as a governing technique of the authoritarian party-state.

The politics of self-confidence: a governing technique

Educating people to be politically and culturally self-confident is a simultaneously totalising and individualising process. The party-state exercises top-down, authoritarian power over the population by attempting to shape its cognition, affection and behaviour about self-confidence in an individuating, intimate way. This process can be seen as the party-state’s appropriation of the reality that individual consciousness has increased among Chinese people, a development often considered transformative in the traditionally collectivist Chinese society and attributed to the marketisation of economy since the 1980s (Hansen, 2015; Yan, 2009). Indeed, instead of direct control to prohibit, regulate, or prevent individuality, the party-state’s ideological work in recent years features ‘soft’, dispersive strategies that permeate private lives and persuade individuals to take part in ideological production as well as consumption (Chen & Wang, 2019; Repnikova & Fang, 2018). In the individuation of politico-cultural self-confidence, individuals are managed as subjects rather than citizens, given that they are on the receiving end of state-led confident nationalism, having no say in determining why to be self-confident or what to be confident about. Nevertheless, the success of confident nationalism rests on individuals willing and able to regulate and turn themselves to be self-confident about the nation. It means that individuals are not simply subjugated but subjectivated, in the sense that the party-state subjugates individuals to its politico-cultural self-confidence agenda by enacting individuals to think, feel and act in a self-confident manner in everyday life.

Self-confidence seems to be a positive term hard to dispute. However, a close look at its characteristics allows us to understand how it functions as a governing technique for the party-state’s regime legitimation. Self-confidence is an individual attribute with characteristics. According to Oney and Oksuzoglu-Guven’s (2015) review of the conceptualizations of confidence, self-confidence is considered as a cognitive concept about the assured expectation of future events based on intellectual judgment of past and present experience and evidence and, furthermore, an affective concept about a feeling of certainty about the future. For even though grounded on the cognitive judgment of the past and present, the expectation of the future, as Rotenstreich (1972) discusses, ‘cannot be viewed as fully rational’ because of ‘the extrapolation of experience’ in the prediction of the future, which means that ‘there is here a shot in the dark or a risk, since the future constancy has to be presupposed, expected, but certainly cannot be taken for granted’ (p. 353). It is for the inescapable epistemological uncertainty beneath the feeling of certainty that Rotenstreich (1972) sees confidence as ‘reliance’ or dependence, ‘a situation of [psychologically] binding [one] together’ with what or whom s/he confides in (p. 350).

As an affective and positive attribute, self-confidence closely corresponds to the rhetoric of ‘positive energy’ (zheng nengliang) in the official discourse and, more generally, the psychologisation of governance in China in recent years. The ‘positive energy’ rhetoric originally appeared in popular discourse to encourage personal optimism and charitable actions but is appropriated by the party-state to propagate political ideologies including nationalism (Chen & Wang, 2019; Triggs, 2019; P. Yang & Tang, 2018). Similarly, the rhetoric of self-confidence as a governing technique does not prevent but discursively appropriates the positive individual attribute generally recognisable and desirable in public discourse. By examining the party-state media’s attempt to make marginalised people feel happy, J. Yang (2013) argues that happiness serves as a technique in the party-state’s psychologisation of governance, which manages ‘socioeconomic issues in psychological terms’ and maintains ‘political control in the guise of emotional support’ (p. 294). Likewise, self-confidence can be seen as a technique of psychologised governance that personalises political ideology as a psychological matter, conflates political support with personal feeling or belief in the future, and consequently, breeds personal dependence on and psychological ties with the party-state for the certainty about the future.

Furthermore, happiness, or psychology in general, penetrates and regulates individuals’ social imagination (Brinkmann, 2011; J. Yang, 2013). Likewise, self-confidence, which averts uncertainty in predicting the future, contributes to regime legitimation by turning individuals away from alternative political imaginations. Critical feminist studies in Western contexts provide insights into this function of self-confidence. Favaro (2017) examined the rise of ‘confidence chic’ that advocates women to be confident about themselves in Western commercial fashion discourse, pointing out that the confidence discourse could be, in light of Sara Ahmed’s (2010) study on the politics of happiness, about ‘the narrowing of horizons, about giving up an interest in what lies beyond the familiar’ (p. 61, cited in Favaro, p. 298).

Gill and Orgad (2015, 2017) also critically discuss that the movement of encouraging women to be self-confident, which they called the ‘confidence cult(ure)’, renders self-doubt and vulnerability abhorrent and problematic, repudiates negative feelings, anger and complaint in particular, and makes women question, regulate and change themselves within existing, rather than disrupt and seek to change, structural gender inequalities. By the same token, self-confidence as an individualising, subjectivising and self-regulating technique allows the party-state to portray and pathologise any political disagreement or grievance as self-doubt and self-defeating, and to invent and impose psychological pressure for individuals to actively question and govern themselves if having views deviates from official lines.

Self-confidence also has the ‘recognised characteristics’ of ‘verifiability, dynamism and future orientation’ (Oney & Oksuzoglu-Guven, 2015, p. 151). That leads to three more observations of self-confidence as a governing technique. First, verifiability means that self-confidence is an expression, a ‘performance’, and an ‘act of conduct’ (Rotenstreich, 1972, p. 349), which cannot be hidden but is observable and verifiable. This attests to the fact that educating people to be politically and culturally self-confident is a ‘conduct of conduct’. Furthermore, verifiability suggests that it is a conduct of turning individuals’ inner political beliefs outside and making them demonstrable, observable and thus measurable, governable to the party-state, a feature echoing the aforementioned simplification of national development.

Second, time is inherently associated with confidence, which ‘assumes that there is a future or rather is based on this assumption’ (Rotenstreich, 1972, p. 351). If the earlier state nationalism which emphasised national victimhood is the CCP’s exploitation of past humiliating and traumatic experiences to legitimise its rule over China at the time, then the present confident nationalism is arguably the CCP’s appropriation of recent socioeconomic improvements in the attempt to carry its ruling legitimacy into the future.

Third, insofar as it is based on experiences subject to updating and renewal, self-confidence is inevitably unsettled and dynamic over time. While national developments in the past decades are the primary grounds on which the party-state boosts the politico-cultural self-confidence of Chinese people, any socioeconomic downturn in the future could undermine the push. Adding to the unpredictability is the freedom on the part of individuals, which, as the condition and even precondition of the party-state’s subjectivation of individuals to be self-confident, leaves room for them to question and counter the push. Recent cultural trends among young people suggest counter-conduct possibilities. For instance, almost at the same time when the party-state took up the rhetoric of self-confidence in 2016, there emerged, as Tan and Cheng (2020) observed, a subculture among urban Chinese youth that appropriates the Chinese character sang (literarily bereavement, loss) to express ‘negative sentiments such as defeatism, disenchantment and disconsolation’ as a way to satirise official positive narratives (p. 87). More recently, in the face of the economic slowdown and shrinking labour markets, which pressure young people to work harder and outperform their peers, ‘lying flat’ (tangping), or shrug off work and strive for nothing, became trendy among urban youth in 2021. It is seen as a ‘strategic refusal … [to] withdraw from the rat race and the bright and hopeful future promised by the discourse of China’s rise’ (Gullotta & Lin, 2022, p. 8). Similarly, young people popularise and identify themselves with the metaphor ‘garlic chives’ (jiucai) as a self-mockery to highlight the predicament of being bio-economic subjects activated to work and produce profits only to be reaped by the establishment (Pang, 2022). While not the focus of this article, how Chinese individuals respond to the official push for politico-cultural self-confidence, and more generally, to the part-state’s governmentality and subjectivation, deserves close and continuing examination.

Drawing upon its conceptual characteristics, this section has critically interrogated how self-confidence works as a governing technique for the CCP regime to legitimise itself in the contemporary context. The technique of self-confidence enables the party-state to subjugate people to its rule and control by individuating and subjectivising a feeling of certainty about the future verifiable by the party-state, a feeling that depends on the CCP, pathologises political grievances, and precludes alternative political imaginaries. Given that individuals are activated to serve the interests of the CCP regime rather than the other way around, the will of individuals is the means rather than the end of the party-state’s will in this process of subjugation through subjectivation. In other words, it is subject autonomised for subjugation rather than citizen subjugated for autonomy that lies behind the confident nationalism and patriotic education dominating the landscape of citizenship education in contemporary China. To counter the reduction of citizenship education to an apparatus of subjugation, the remainder of this article turns to reimagine Chinese citizenship education by exploring how it can perform as a venue for desubjugation and autonomy. Bearing in mind the citizen-subject or self-other dynamic, I suggest that it is crucial to promote in citizenship education humility that centres on contingency, interdependence, and critique of the past and present, as opposed to confidence featuring certainty, dependence, and certitude of the future.

Appreciating political humility: contingency, interdependence and critique

While the subjective feeling of certainty about a future dependent on others can work as a technique for subjugation as revealed in the last section, to be a citizen does not mean to be independent of others or certain about the self. Citizen is distinct from subject in the governance by self rather than others, but the citizen-subject distinction is not clear-cut, given the intertwining of governing others and oneself, as elaborated in the second section. This brings us to realise that citizen features being both committed to autonomy and conditioned by others. It means that citizens govern themselves not in the liberalist illusion of self-mastery or free will but inescapably under what Butler (2004) called ‘the condition of primary vulnerability, of being given over to the touch of the other’ (pp. 31–32), or more precisely, ‘within relations to others and to social norms that pre-exist us’ (Rushing, 2010, p. 289).

This ontologically relational rather than independent understanding of citizens implies that citizens’ knowledge of self and the world is empirically incomplete and historically contingent. For they can never give a ‘final or adequate account’ of self, because the narration of self is an account of the self before, and unavoidably fails to give an account of the narrating self at, let alone after, the scene and moment that the self is introduced to others (Butler, 2005, p. 67). They can only know the world from particular perspectives, because individual citizens have ‘different locations’ in the world as ‘the common meeting ground of all’, where ‘everybody sees and hears from a different position’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 57). Recognising and accepting the limits of knowing is what humility means as an ethical disposition in Butlerian ethics, which sees the vulnerable, limited self as ‘the condition, not the obstacle’ (Rushing, 2010, p. 295). Button (2005) also applies the cognitive or epistemological limitations to the ethico-political realm, arguing against ‘political and cultural … forms of complacency and misdiagnosed accounts of completeness that serve to close the doors of sensibility to what it is “outside” or “other” to the self, group, or nation’ and for what he called ‘democratic humility’:

… a cultivated sensitivity toward the limitations, incompleteness, and contingency of both one’s personal moral powers and commitments, and of the particular forms, laws, and institutions that structure one’s political and social life with others. (p. 851)

Seeing this sensitivity as a political ethic to accommodate the ‘cultural and ethical pluralism and substantive, agonistic strife’ characterising contemporary late modern times (p. 854), Button makes a case for democratic humility that facilitates ‘mutual attentiveness, political inclusion, reciprocal learning, and moral growth’ (p. 856). That is, neither retreating to self-abasement or self-renunciation nor reducing to cognitive incomprehension or moral irrelevance, democratic humility brings awareness to the interdependence with different others in the formation of limited, contingent self and society, and furthermore, in the transformation for alternative identities and institutions in light of different others.

The political humility referred to here thus both acknowledges ontological vulnerability and corresponding epistemological contingency and aspires to transformation through ethico-political interdependence. The latter ensures that the acknowledgement does not shrink to passive submission but links with activeness or agency, while the former cautions that the transformation does not bear out a predetermined, certain future but builds upon the existent, contingent past and present. Transformation so perceived brings critique to the fore. Foucault (2002) explains that if governmentality reveals the ‘mechanisms of power’ through which ‘individuals are subjugated’ to governing goals rationalised and objectified as truth, critique ‘would essentially ensure the desubjugation’ of citizen-subject with ‘the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth’ (p. 194). It follows that, as Butler (2002) discusses, Foucauldian critique carries ‘a double task’ of showing both ‘the conditions by which the object field is constituted … [and] the limits of those conditions, the moments where they point up their contingency and their transformability’ (p. 222). It is by exposing the particularity and contingency of objectified and universalised existing identities and institutions, which condition, but not necessarily obstruct, the agency of citizen-subject that critique opens the door for transformation as desubjugation. In other words, it is by ‘unsettling’ the ‘established order [which] limits our understanding of what can be’ that critique ‘frees us to ask what might “be” beyond our horizon of knowledge’ (Rushing, 2010, p. 296). This brings us back to the commitment to autonomy characterising citizen in contrast to subject. Autonomy in light of political humility with contingency, interdependence and critique at the centre is similar to what Rushing (2021) called ‘humility-informed-relational-autonomy’, which recognises the relationality in self-determination, highlights the reciprocity of humility and autonomy, and maintains the normative aspiration of agency in the quest for autonomy.

Humility in association with autonomy is the upshot of contemporary revitalisation and reconfiguration of humility in Western political theory, which ‘almost entirely left [humility] out’ of modern liberal and democratic debates due to its passive, negative implications of unconditional acceptance of low position and submission to higher authority bequeathed by traditional Christianity (Button, 2005, p. 840). Humility is also part of traditional Chinese ethics represented by Confucian philosophy. Though not explicitly expressed, it serves as a ‘pivotal’ theme throughout the Analects, the primary text of Confucianism (Rushing, 2013, p. 216). Humility for Confucius, according to Rushing, is not blind submission as opposed to Christian humility but about recognition of human relationality and historicity, active engagement with existing norms, and even struggle for political transformation, all of which are constitutive of the political humility appreciated in this article. Indeed, it is often considered that in Chinese and even Asian cultures the self is not an individualist or collectivist but ‘relationalist’ being, playing an active role in the collective (Lee, 2004). Leaving aside the question of whether this is the case or not given the increased individual consciousness in contemporary China, it is important to note that the relational and active elements in Confucian humility are put in service to protect the hierarchical, patriarchal and unequal Confucian ethico-political order that runs counter to liberty and autonomy. This is why Rushing (2021) cautions that not unlike Christian humility, Confucian humility is ‘fundamentally conservative’ and ‘not sufficient’ (p. 50).

Citizens observing the autonomy-committed humility elaborated above are expected to acknowledge the shared condition of vulnerability and contingency, value the ethical and political interdependence with others, and critique the past and present for desubjugation and transformation. The humble citizen in this sense is distinct in onto-epistemological and ethico-political terms from the confident subject certain about a CCP-dependent future that contemporary Chinese citizenship education is set to produce, as examined in the last two sections.

Conclusion: humble citizenship education as desubjugation for autonomy

This article questions the Chinese party-state’s push for politic-cultural self-confidence in education and the wider society by identifying the oscillation of focus from victimhood to confidence in state-led nationalism and patriotic education and interrogating how self-confidence works as a governing technique for the party-state to retain regime legitimacy. It argues that self-confidence allows the party-state to subjugate people by individuating and subjectivising a verifiable feeling of certainty about the future, which depends on the CCP, pathologises political grievances, and precludes alternative political imaginaries. While the subjugation produces confident subjects that serve the party-state’s interest, it does not mean that citizens are not subject to power in the Foucauldian sense. Seeing subjugation to power as the inevitable condition for citizen as well as subject, this article also seeks to protect the commitment to and quest for autonomy, the hallmark of citizen and citizenship education as opposed to subject and subjecthood education. Drawing upon the notion of political humility in contemporary political theory, I suggest that in place of self-confidence that perpetuates subjugation through subjectivation, teaching and learning political humility centring on contingency, interdependence, and critique of the past and present is key to citizenship education that challenges rather than capitulates to subjugation and strives for rather than surrenders autonomy. In short, I argue for humble citizenship education as a way of desubjugation towards autonomy.

Humility is not new to Chinese ethics, but how to reconfigure and associate the relational and active elements with autonomy in humble citizenship education remains unaddressed. Still, how to promote political humility in Chinese citizenship education occupied by confident nationalism deserves future exploration. Nevertheless, humble citizenship education presents a culturally relevant way to desubjugate the confident subject subjectivised to serve the interest of the Chinese authoritarian regime and an ethically relational way to rescue or rekindle the citizenship ideal of autonomy in the face of modern state intervention and postmodern pluralism and antagonism.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 See the Global Times’s news piece ‘GT survey shows 90% say China should not look up to West; experts say confident Chinese won’t tolerate foreign provocations’ on 19 April 2021, which is available at https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202104/1221496.shtml (accessed 19 April 2023).

2 The rhetoric was expressed for the first time by CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping in his speech celebrating the 95th founding anniversary of the CCP in 2016 and restressed in his speeches in the national propaganda meeting and the national education meeting in 2018. See http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2016-07/01/c_1119150660.htm, http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2018-08/22/content_5315723.htm and http://edu.people.com.cn/n1/2018/0911/c1053-30286253.html (accessed 19 April 2023).

3 A quick search on the online database of the People’s Daily suggests that the term ‘red gene’ appeared for the first time as late as 2007.

4 The Ministry of Education and the CCP Propaganda Department jointly issued in 2020 the Implementation Plan to Reform and Innovate School Ideopolitical Subjects in the New Era, which specifies ideopolitical subjects from primary all the way up to postgraduate education. Also, the Ministry of Education issued in 2022 the Working Plan to Facilitate the Construction of ‘Aggrandised Ideopolitical subject’ (dasizhengke), which sets out the plan to apply the ideopolitical function to all curricula in schools and universities. Self-confidence is stated as a primary goal in both plans. The former is available at http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A26/jcj_kcjcgh/202012/t20201231_508361.html and the latter at http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A13/moe_772/202208/t20220818_653672.html (accessed 19 April 2023).

5 For instance, a People’s Daily report (11 March 2017, p. 5) answered the self-imposed question of why Chinese are more and more self-confident by referring to economic developments, sports victories, technological advancements, improved living standards, and the charm of Chinese culture on the world stage, among others. See http://inews.ifeng.com/50770184/news.shtml (accessed 23 April 2023). In a commentary in China Youth Daily (16 June 2022, p. 6), the official newspaper of the CCP’s youth league, youth’s self-confidence is described as an ‘important outcome of national development’. See http://zqb.cyol.com/html/2022-06/16/nw.D110000zgqnb_20220616_4-06.htm (accessed 23 April 2023).