The knowledge and power in Chinese education

Abstract

The article explores the relationship between knowledge and power in the field of education in China. The article adopts the research method of documentary analysis to discourse analyse the classical literature in Chinese history. The article selects the Zhou Dynasty, the Han Dynasty, the Tang Dynasty, and the Song Dynasty as representatives of ancient China and the period of the Cultural Revolution as representatives of modern China. The goal of the article is to propose a structurally similar research perspective on Chinese education that can account for the co-temporal states between different periods in time. By initially applying this perspective to the study of Chinese education, its structure of knowledge and power shows a pattern of subordination of education to politics, which is internalised by the educated individuals through discipline in educational activities.

Keywords:

• Chinese history
• Chinese education
• knowledge
• power
• discipline

Reviewing Editor:

• Samuel Adu-Gyamfi, History and Political Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology College of Arts and Social Science, Kumasi, Ghana

Subjects:

• Asian History
• Medieval History 400-1500
• Contemporary History 1945
• Intellectual History
• Social & Cultural History

Introduction

Ever since Michel Foucault completed his great work ‘Discipline and Punish’, the social sciences and humanities have had a new perspective on the interrelationship between power and knowledge. In his work, Foucault shows us how educational institutions, such as schools, influence their students through a variety of mechanisms, a practice that is ultimately reduced to an activity called discipline. The development of discipline is the result of the interplay between knowledge and power, whereby a new field of knowledge about the human person fosters the emergence of a power activity that practices this knowledge in order to test the truth, and a power that seeks to control certain objects stimulates the emergence of a new body of knowledge about the object to be controlled in order to strengthen itself.

This paper builds on the above conclusions already presented in Discipline and Punish, Foucault’s study of European history and European societies, and his views on discipline and punishment, and on knowledge and power, are therefore characterised by a number of uniquely European features. Does this affect the generality of his views? Is discipline a phenomenon unique to European culture? Is this relationship between power and knowledge a product of modern society? As an answer to these questions, this paper will study Chinese education in history, and we will find that knowledge and power are also closely intertwined in Chinese education, and propose a research perspective that is specific to Chinese education. Knowledge becomes subordinate to power, and power can exist as knowledge. This relationship between knowledge and power allows disciplining to manifest itself in China as an activity that enables subjects to internalise knowledge about political power in themselves.

The research methodology adopted in this paper is a documentary study, and by discourse analysing those documents that contain educational concepts in Chinese history, we can propose a perspective for studying knowledge and power in Chinese education. The perspective aims to illustrate the structural similarity of co-occurring states between different periods. The documents selected for this paper have an official background, they and their authors have been officially recognised by the political establishment for a certain period of time, and because they exist as influential classics, they are particularly suitable for proposing a new research perspective and demonstrating how it can be applied. Given China’s long history and local variations, it is not possible to demonstrate continuity throughout the historical process or the universality of individual diachronic states in this paper within the space limitations. Instead, the goal of this article is to propose a new perspective on knowledge and power that explores the structural similarities between diachronic states by examining them across time. By using this perspective to compare different historical periods, the article demonstrates the methodology and value of the new perspective and provides a preliminary account of the relationship between knowledge and power in Chinese education.

Traditional education

Even after foreign invasions, socialist waves and post-reform and opening-up globalization, ancient Chinese education still has an important influence on contemporary Chinese education, with some studies suggesting that traditional education may play a positive role in strengthening citizenship (Wang, 2022), while others argue that traditional education hinders the development of vocational education (Wang, 2024). A number of studies have more or less absorbed Foucault’s concepts or applied Foucault’s methodology, however, most of them focus on the contemporary impact of traditional education and analyze the phenomenon mainly from the perspective of power and regulation. The number of diachronic studies devoted to antiquity is small, and knowledge is not examined in the same hierarchical structure as power.

In this section, the main task of the study is to introduce knowledge and power as a complete structure into the discourse analysis of traditional education literature, and discipline will also be paid attention to as an essential part of the structure of knowledge and power. The documents we have selected are the products of four different dynasties, which occupy the position of classic works in traditional Chinese education, and each of them is short in length and simple in content. This helps us to demonstrate a research perspective that focuses on knowledge and power, and helps us to find certain structural similarities between the diachronic states of different periods.

Confucius

During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, there lived the most famous and respected educator in Chinese history, Confucius, and we will analyze his most classic work, ‘The Analects’. In Confucius’ discourse on poetry, we find a clear relationship between knowledge and power. Confucius first assigns four basic functions to poems, and then points out that their function for man is to ‘serve the father in the near future and the ruler in the far future, so that man can acquire more knowledge than birds, animals, and grass’ (Confucius, 2016c). In terms of content, poetry as a literary discipline is explicitly bound up with the service of patriarchy and monarchy; in terms of form, the role of letting people acquire knowledge is placed in the same type of expression as the role of serving the family and the state, and power and knowledge are placed in the same cognitive field. We can thus find that even in the early stages of Chinese history, knowledge and power were already inseparable, and knowledge was considered to be in the service of and homogeneous with power.

Combined with Confucius’ other discourses, we can find out what the homogeneity of knowledge and power is. Confucius’ requirement for a well-educated adult is that ‘a gentleman should seek the Dao and not the food’ (Confucius, 2016a), which means that a gentleman should not think about food and drink, but rather about his own way of life. It has been a matter of debate as to what the Dao means to Confucius in an ontological sense, but in social practice the Dao is a way of life that is related to the governance of the state, and thus the individual’s life choices are closely linked to the governance of the state. Immediately following this Confucius gives the reason why a gentleman does not have to think about food and drink ‘to learn, and the official’s salary is in this activity’ (Confucius, 2016a). There are two meanings here, the superficial one that learning as an activity is aimed at obtaining an official’s position, and the deeper one that learning as an activity is itself homogeneous with the official’s political activity. What makes this homogeneity possible is the Dao that the gentleman learns, and since the education that the individual receives is a way of life that internalizes the governance of the state in the day-to-day, the political activity of the official and the personal life of the gentleman are connected by a kind of participation in public affairs. One direct evidence of this is the statement in the Analects of Confucius about the Dao that ‘the Dao of King Wen and King Wu of Zhou has not disappeared, but has been handed down among the people’ (Confucius, 2016d), and that the Dao as the political principle of the ruler continues to exist through the lives of the people.

It follows that the basis for a kind of regulation is already present in Confucius’ educational philosophy, where it manifests itself in the supervision of the individual’s acceptance of a way of life that internalizes political activity. Supervision at this point is made possible by relying on the subject’s reflection on the interrelationship between self and others. ‘Going to those who possess the Dao to correct one’s faults’; ‘Choosing the strengths of others to learn from others, and choosing the weaknesses of others to reflect on and correct oneself’ (Confucius, 2016b), the educated individual here realizes supervision through the self, and the rules given by Confucius are closer to advice than to a decree, in the sense that Confucius’s In this sense, Confucius’s philosophy of education does not include discipline, but only has the possibility of realizing discipline. But when the state later officializes Confucius’s rules and assumes the power to examine the individual, discipline does arise.

To conclude this section, let us look at the thought of Laozi. China during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods did not have an official doctrine, so different doctrines were in competition with each other. Confucianism, represented by Confucius, and Taoism, represented by Laozi, were opposed in their attitudes toward politics. In the ‘Daodejing’, Laozi pointed out that ‘cutting off the sacred and abandoning wisdom’ (Laozi, 2022) would enable the people to gain a hundredfold, and that ‘the production of wisdom leads to hypocrisy and falsehood’ (Laozi, 2022). Laozi is not asking people to remain stupid and ignorant, but rather believes that a specialized knowledge will control people’s deviation from the right way of life. In fact, this is precisely Laozi’s objection to knowledge that internalizes political power. As a skeptic, Laozi demonstrates the interrelationship between power and knowledge in Confucius’s thought from the opposite side.

Confucian doctrines

During his reign, Emperor Wu of Han expelled non-Confucian scholars from state educational institutions, promoted those educated in Confucianism to senior positions, and set up official institutions within the state to teach Confucianism. Since then, Confucianism has been the official theory and content of education in China.

Confucianism was founded by later generations of scholars who were influenced by and honored Confucius as their spiritual leader, and one of the main works of these later generations was the ‘Records of Rites’, which is one of the ‘Five Classics’ China’s official books of instruction. In the ‘Records of Rites’ there is a text devoted to education and learning, the ‘Xueji’, which is the text most directly and closely related to education in the ‘Five Classics’.

As the article begins by stating bluntly that ‘Ancient monarchs who established a state to rule over the people gave first place to the cause of educating the people so that they could learn’ (Dai, 2017), the significance of educational activity and of the knowledge it represents is thus derived directly from the needs of political power to rule. In describing the rules of education to be followed by the supreme educational institution, schools were required to begin their instruction with the recitation of three poems from the ‘the Poetry’ about the harmonious relationship between the ruler and his ministers, with the aim of ‘letting the students feel the feelings of the officials from the very beginning of their studies’ (Dai, 2017). Literary activity here became a way of experiencing political activity, and literary knowledge and power became homogenous.

The article also discusses the learning goals of the educated, ‘Where learning is concerned, those who are officials should first learn to handle affairs, and those who are scholars should first establish their own ambitions’ (Dai, 2017), we can see that a political identity and a cultural identity are here divided into two different goals of learning, and that the two different goals give rise to two different centers of gravity for learning. However, the division is made within the same type of learning activity. Learning as a knowledge activity is not divided into two separate categories, i.e. political and cultural, but rather has some non-essential differences under the same discipline of knowledge, and it is for this reason that becoming an official and becoming a scholar are both categorized as learning in the same sentence.

The article not only provides various rules for students, but also requirements for teachers. ‘He who can be a good teacher can become an official, and he who can become an official can become a monarch’; ‘So he who is a teacher is he who teaches the knowledge that governs the country and the people’ (Dai, 2017). In the first sentence, we find that having the ability needed to educate others as teachers do is the basis for becoming a political ruling class; in the second sentence, we find that the content of a teacher’s teaching is considered to be essentially a kind of knowledge about political ruling activities. It can be found quite straightforwardly that having knowledge is the basis for acquiring power, and that power itself is the content of knowledge.

We have already discovered that the relationship between knowledge in the service of power and power as the content of knowledge persists in the doctrines of future generations of scholars. Now let us see if there is some kind of discipline in educational activity.

The article is clear about the different standards of assessment according to the year of study, ‘The first year examines the student’s ability to analyze Scripture and his personal aspirations’; ‘the third year examines whether the student is academically responsible and maintains good interpersonal relationships’; ‘The fifth year examines the student’s breadth of knowledge and respect for teachers’ (Dai, 2017). After that, there are the seventh and ninth year standards, with those who meet the seventh year standards entering the preparatory state for graduation, and those who meet the ninth year standards reaching the state of complete graduation. We can see that the commonality of the assessment criteria is that it combines the examination of students’ knowledge level with the examination of their personal moral behavior, so it is an assessment system that continuously monitors students’ knowledge and behavior over time, and this system has already taken on some of the characteristics of discipline.

Taking it a step further, we can find some initiatives that are more similar to the disciplines of European education. ‘Students are required to open their trunks and take out their school supplies according to the sound of the drum when they enter the school, which enables them to take their studies seriously’; ‘Teachers are required to whip the students’ tools to show authority and maintain order’ (Dai, 2017). These were already very similar to the disciplinary methods used for students in European military schools. However, China’s particularities also remain, and the article advocates a softer approach than a more forceful one: ‘Teachers should observe the students while learning without saying anything, so that the students can retain the space to think’; ‘Teachers who give advice and do not forcefully guide students will make the relationship between teacher and student harmonious, those who admonish students and do not force them will make teaching easy, and those who enlighten students and do not inculcate knowledge will make them think’ (Dai, 2017), and this more relaxed form of discipline is known as ‘Jiao hua’ in the Chinese language.

What is more Chinese is that the article puts a certain demand on the monarch, who should emphasize education and respect the teachers: ‘When teachers are respected, then the way they teach will be respected, and when the way is respected, then the people will learn to devote themselves to their studies’; ‘When a man is a teacher, the monarch cannot treat him as a subject’ (Dai, 2017). This suggests that when educational activity closely combines knowledge and power, those who control it in practice become a manifestation of this mechanism, and the teacher acquires a special status as a representative of the transformation of power into knowledge and the maintenance of power through knowledge. The respect shown by the monarch to the teachers was in fact an esteem for the system behind them.

Imperial examination system

Beginning with the Sui Dynasty, China began to establish the imperial examination system, a system of training and selection of talents in which the state specifies the content of education and assessment standards. The emergence of the imperial examination system brought significant changes to education in ancient China, and education became more institutionalized and standardized. Since the Sui dynasty actually died after only two generations of emperors, we will take the Tang dynasty as the target to study the imperial examination system. ‘The New Book of Tang’, which has the status of an official history book, has two chapters, Volume 44 and Volume 45, dedicated to discussing the election of talents and officials, in which the system of the imperial examination is covered in many ways, and therefore we will take these two chapters as the the object of study.

The first half of the forty-fourth volume records the different admission criteria for students in different levels of educational institutions, the hierarchical classification of books of instruction, and the criteria for assessing the academic performance of students, from which we can detect the systematic management of knowledge by the powers that be.

Some educational institutions were only accessible to the descendants of the ruling class, ‘The Guo Zi Academy, which could accept 300 students, and those who became students had to be: the son or grandson of a civil or military official of the third rank or above; the great-grandson of an official of the second rank or above; the son of a second-ranking military title; the son of a county duke; and the son of a fourth-ranking central government official who had been rewarded by the third-ranking title’ (Song et al., 1975a). Some educational institutions, on the other hand, could accept the offspring of commoners, ‘Si Men schools, which could accept thirteen hundred students’ (Song et al., 1975a), followed immediately by an account of the quota of five hundred of these students being the children of officials of a certain rank, and finally ‘eight hundred students to be filled by exceptionally distinguished persons among the commoners’ (Song et al., 1975a). It is straightforward to see that knowledge is associated with hierarchical power, and that the quality of education and the likelihood of acquiring knowledge are inextricably linked to a person’s family’s position in the hierarchy of power.

There was also a hierarchical difference between the books of instruction, the ‘Five Classics’ was already an official textbook during the Han dynasty, and the Tang dynasty inherited this but categorized them into different classes. ‘The Book of Rites, the Spring and Autumn Zuo’s biography is the major scripture; the Poetry, the Rites of Zhou, and the Rites of Passage are the middle scripture; the Yi, the Shangshu, the Spring and Autumn Ram’s biography, and the Gu Liang’s biography are the minor scripture’ (Song et al., 1975a). Not only was there a hierarchical division among the ‘Five Classics’, but also among the books mentioned above, Zhouli and Yili did not belong to the ‘Five Classics’, and they were called the ‘three Classics’ together with the Book of Rites, so it is clear that there was a hierarchical difference among the ‘three Classics’ as well. The most interesting is the book ‘Spring and Autumn Annals’, because its original text is obscure and difficult to understand, therefore, in education, most of them use the version that has been annotated by scholars of later generations, and the main three versions appear in the above classification, and there is also a hierarchical difference between the different annotated versions of the same book. Thus knowledge was not only associated with a hierarchical system of power, but knowledge itself was also hierarchized by power.

The difference in the grades of the books of instruction was linked to the assessment of the students’ grades, and the study of the knowledge of books of different grades could lead to the evaluation of grades of different grades. ‘All students of Hongwenkan and Chongwenkan were examined with one major sutra and one minor sutra or two medium sutras’ (Song et al., 1975a), ‘For the examination of any jinshi, he was examined with five questions discussing current affairs and with the original contents of one major sutra, and those who passed the two examinations completely with their answers obtained Grade A grades’ (Song et al., 1975a). The hierarchical nature of knowledge thus affects students, who must internalize the categorization that there is a hierarchical difference in knowledge in order to pass the examination. Another focus of the content of the article above is that the examination involves not only the examination of books of instruction but also the examination of political skills. As mentioned above, the examination on current affairs existed, and so did the examination on the methods of governing the country, such as ‘the examination for all the xiucai was examined with five questions discussing the methods and strategies of governing the country’ (Song et al., 1975a). It can be found that, among the assessment standards of the education system, the students’ political ability and attitude and the knowledge they acquired from books were examined together under the same kind of examination. This again confirms the homogeneity of knowledge and power in ancient Chinese education, where the exercise of power and the acquisition of knowledge were synchronized.

A large portion of the forty-fifth volume is devoted to recording what grades of official positions are available to students who obtain different grades. ‘Anyone who passes the xiucai examination will serve as an official of the first eight grades of the upper level if he or she obtains a higher upper grade, an official of the first eight grades of the lower level if he or she obtains an intermediate upper grade, an official of the second eight grades of the upper level if he or she obtains a lower upper grade, and an official of the second eight grades of the lower level if he or she obtains a higher intermediate grade’ (Song et al., 1975b). Since the imperial examination system was created for the purpose of human resource management activities for the state bureaucracy, there is a direct calculation between what a student achieves in the field of knowledge and the status he can obtain in the field of power. This is in fact the process of knowledge disciplining individuals for power, which makes the individual in educational activity simultaneously an individual in political activity. It can be said that the examination itself becomes a kind of discipline, and the imperial examination system is a system of discipline.

School of Li

During the Song dynasty, School of Li emerged as a new school of thought in the Chinese Confucian academic tradition, and it gradually gained an official status in the course of history, a status that lasted from the Song dynasty to the Qing dynasty, and which changed the influence of Confucianism in Chinese education. We will study the impact of Li on education in the light of the ‘ Record of recent thoughts ‘ of the Song scholar Zhu Xi. Zhu XI is the leader of the school, and ‘Record of recent thoughts’ is the summary of the theories of the scholars who preceded him in the school. Three of the chapters in the book are related to education in their titles: Volume II is titled ‘Conducting Learning’, Volume III is titled ‘Acquiring Knowledge’, and Volume XI is titled ‘Educating Students.

The second volume discusses the learning of the gentleman, and with regard to the goal of such learning, the text states that ‘the gentleman helps the people and cultivates his own virtues, and the cause of the gentleman consists of these two activities alone, and nothing else at all, and these two activities are the way in which one exists as a self and a human being’ (Zhu & Lv, 2020b). Helping the people is a political activity in the context of Confucianism, while cultivating virtue is an individual’s moral activity, and political and moral activities are thus correlated. Moral activity is in turn treated as the only activity that can lead to the acquisition of knowledge, ‘so it is said that there is no way for a gentleman to acquire knowledge except by improving his own virtue’ (Zhu & Lv, 2020b). As for morality, the article also says that ‘the father is the superior of the son, and the ruler is the superior of the subject; this is the eternal rule of the world, and there is no possibility of escaping from it between heaven and earth, and man cannot have a private mind if he is to remain stable in the Divine order’ (Zhu & Lv, 2020b), and so individual morality is linked to the hierarchical system of power in terms of its content, which at the same time represents the acquisition of knowledge. This represents at the same time that the only possibility of acquiring knowledge is associated with obedience to a hierarchical system of power.

One important element in the above narrative is that one should not possess selfishness, which is the goal of this chapter of the gentleman’s study, ‘To act according to the Divine Laws is to be free of arrogant thoughts, and to act according to one’s personal desires is to have arrogant thoughts’; ‘Promote your heart, and you will be able to experience all the things of the world; if there exist things that are not experienced, it means that there is a gap between your heart and the things’ (Zhu & Lv, 2020b). All human behavior and the possibility of human acquisition of knowledge about various things in the world are linked to the presence or absence of private inner activity in a person. Good behavior and the acquisition of knowledge are based on the elimination of the gap between the individual’s inner self and the Divine order, which is, however, also a patriarchal and monarchical order of power, and so learning becomes an activity that disciplines the mind in order to demand obedience to the social order.

In the third volume we can find a more direct relationship between knowledge and power, which may well be an inheritance from earlier scholarly traditions. ‘It should be true that when one has not read the Poetry one is not good at handling politics and cannot independently travel to other countries, and when one has read the Poetry one is good at handling politics and is able to travel independently to countries in all directions’ (Zhu & Lv, 2020c), and that whether or not one has improved his or her political ability is an important test of whether or not one has acquired knowledge. The homogeneity of knowledge and power remains here as well. The hierarchical difference of knowledge itself can also be found in the article, ‘Where the results of the six kinds of divination are concerned, everyone can make use of them; sages naturally have the use of sages, the public naturally have the use of the public, scholars naturally have the use of scholars, monarchs have the use of monarchs, ministers have the use of ministers, and there is nothing that cannot be utilized’ (Zhu & Lv, 2020c). The same knowledge in the same book was considered to be of different use to people in different positions in the hierarchy.

The eleventh volume contains a record of methods of educating students which have increased in the content of the discipline, but have not changed much in the technique of the discipline. ‘When a person is young and has no dominant power in knowledge and thinking, he should be displayed with discourses that are carefully analyzed and correctly reasoned’; ‘A student should only be taught to learn to read the scriptures, and he should not be made to write literature’ (Zhu & Lv, 2020a). Although the technique of discipline is still the direct supervision of the teacher, there is an educational mechanism that protects the educated from factors beyond their control, creating an environment surrounded by scripture in early childhood and only studying scripture as a student are both due to the fact that unofficial books or hobbies can influence one’s thinking and change one’s motivation. Discipline at this point is not just a matter of urging the educated to work hard at their studies, but also an activity of monitoring the educated against outside influences.

Using research perspectives to draw conclusions

The texts we have discussed belong to different historical periods and have very different surface contents and social functions; they express ethical and moral norms, the rules of educational institutions, and the examination system, respectively. However, by analysing these texts through a lens that focuses on knowledge and power, we can see that there is a similar structure between them. Knowledge in ancient Chinese education often depended on the service of political power; ethics wished to train people qualified to engage in political activity, educational institutions were used to train people to become officials, and the examination system was designed to select people to populate bureaucratic organisations. Political power also often exists directly as a form of knowledge; the qualities expected of participants in political power become the ethos, how to serve the monarch and the state becomes the education of educational institutions, and the professional competence required by bureaucratic organisations becomes the main object of the examination system. The basic structure of knowledge and power is their homogeneous way of being; knowledge becomes subordinate to power, and power itself can become knowledge. The research perspective introduces not only knowledge and power, but also the concept of regulation and training, and it can be found that allowing educated individuals to internalise social norms in themselves was a fundamental process of education in ancient China, and through the mechanism of regulation and training, generations of educated individuals were produced as qualified officials. This can explain why the research perspective of this paper contributes to the understanding of the structural similarity of the co-occurring states between different periods in time.

The Cultural Revolution

The rule of the Communist Party of China over China has undoubtedly changed the state of education in China, with some studies discussing how patriotic education in the People’s Republic of China shapes its citizens by introducing Foucault’s concepts (Chen, 2024), and others exploring how the social impacts of the Cultural Revolution have profoundly changed Chinese education (Chou et al., 2020). For many research perspectives, Confucian education as a representative of traditional Chinese education is in conflict with socialist education as the mainstream of modern Chinese education, with some studies arguing that Confucian education in contemporary China struggles with education under the Communist Chinese government (Wang, 2023). As with studies of ancient China, the research that has existed has not examined knowledge and power by placing them in the same hierarchical structure, placing the main focus on contemporary China rather than on the co-extensive state of affairs in a particular historical period. Moreover, studies have emphasized more on the differences between traditional Chinese education and socialist education in China, and lacked attention to the similarities between the two.

The Communist Party and socialism are always a very crucial factor in the study of education in the People’s Republic of China. The Communist Party has initiated many socialist political movements in China, and the most radical of these movements was the Cultural Revolution. Chairman Mao Zedong was not only the top political leader of the Communist Party of China at that time, but also the most influential socialist theorist in China at that time. We will be looking at Chairman Mao’s documentation from 1966 to 1968 to see if the revolution changed the relationship between knowledge and power. The study here focuses on the manifestations of the Cultural Revolution in theory rather than in social practice. We hope that by introducing a perspective that focuses on knowledge and power, we can discover the structural similarities that exist between traditional Chinese education and Chinese socialist education.

Practical, political, intellectual

In the course of the Cultural Revolution, a new approach to education gradually gained official support. As a precursor, on March 12, 1966, Mao Zedong gave instructions for education in the medical field, ‘Medical schools should also strengthen the Marxism-Leninism curriculum, as so many graduates just don’t understand Marxism-Leninism’ (Mao, 2013a, p. 48). The reason is that ‘those who have no or little education can defeat the graduates of the Whampoa Military Academy and the graduates of the Army University’ and ‘the method of eliminating the snail is still the creation of the masses’ (Mao, 2013a, p. 48). The two reasons above have the same connotation, i.e. that people without specialized education can acquire knowledge far beyond that which can be acquired by people with specialized education by virtue of their experience in practice. And these reasons call for the strengthening of Marxist-Leninist education because Marxism-Leninism as a political ideology stands for participation in the social practice of the masses. Although the new approach to education has not yet been fully developed, we can already see the beginnings of a relationship between knowledge and power, in which the acquisition of knowledge is mediated by practice with the masses, which is considered to be an action only for those with a certain political ideology. The acquisition of knowledge is now mediated by practice and closely linked to political positions.

Shortly thereafter, on March 20, 1966, Mao reiterated this theory in a speech to the Political Bureau of the Central Committee. He called for ‘junior colleges, technical schools, and half-work and half-study programs to go to the countryside’ (Mao, 2013a, p. 292), a call for urban educated people to go to the countryside to participate in agricultural production practices. Immediately after, on April 14, 1966, Mao expressed the new educational approach more fully in his critique of an official article. ‘All schools and disciplines’ should ‘go to the factories, go to the countryside, eat, live, and labor with the workers and peasants, learn to work and learn to read’ (Mao, 2013a, p. 316), and we can see that a new method of education had been created, and that it was valid for all educational institutions. Students acquire knowledge now not only by reading in specialized places of education, but also by laboring in places of economic production. The importance of reading has also been drastically weakened, ‘therefore the part of reading has to be greatly reduced, books have to be read, but reading too much is killing people’ (Mao, 2013a, p. 316), therefore the main difference between the new educational method and the common schooling system lies in the weakening of the specialization of education in terms of space and time and in terms of content.

In describing the reasons for this method of education, the military victories of uneducated Communists reappeared, and a new reason was that ‘the university professors and the university students only read books’ (Mao, 2013a, p. 316), which led them to be ‘so poorly educated that they spoke of nothing, and many of them did have one thing to learn, which was to be anti-Communist and anti-people and anti-revolutionary, and still are’ (Mao, 2013a, p. 316). We can see that knowledge gained without participation in productive practice has no place here at all, and even such knowledge is dangerous because it is opposed to the socialist state of the proletariat. Whether one participates in productive practice or not represents whether one has a socialist political position or not, and whether one has a socialist political position or not determines whether the knowledge one learns from books is of value or not, and the validity of the knowledge is then evaluated by the political position. Knowledge and politics show a strong homogeneity, whereby political values are directly reflected in knowledge, and the value of knowledge is ensured through political values.

Class struggle

On January 23, 1967, Mao Zedong encouraged the various student revolutionary factions to unite to seize power, and the Cultural Revolution was described as ‘an all-out class struggle throughout the country, a great revolution in which one class overthrows another’ (Mao, 2013b, p. 251). In 1968, he also talked about the substance and necessity of the Cultural Revolution many times, ‘The proletarian Cultural Revolution is essentially a political revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and all exploiting classes under socialist conditions’ (Mao, 2013c, p. 169); ‘This proletarian cultural revolution is completely necessary for consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat, preventing the restoration of capitalism and building socialism ‘ (Mao, 2013c, p. 311). We can find that the motive of the Cultural Revolution was class struggle and the aim was to ensure that the proletariat won the class struggle. The class struggle then became a major element in the educational activities of the students.

However, class struggle had a complex meaning in the Cultural Revolution. In August 1967 Mao described the target of the revolution as ‘the bourgeois command hidden inside the institutions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it is this part of the institutions of the dictatorship of the proletariat that we are revolutionizing’ (Mao, 2013c, p. 34), and in this way the revolution could be seen as a purge of the bourgeois bureaucrats and bourgeois intelligentsia. However, other materials prove that the revolution is not directed against a certain person or group of people, and in fact it does not call for their elimination. At the meeting on August 12, 1966, Mao Zedong said that ‘a comrade who has made a mistake should always be given a way out, and be allowed to correct his mistakes’ and ‘our policy is to punish the former to prevent the latter, and to treat the sick to save them ‘ (Mao, 2013a, p. 466).

Even the revolution did not seek to expel the political right completely from the institutions of power; in his directive of July 21, 1966, on the work of teachers and students in carrying out the cultural revolution, Mao demanded that ‘the Cultural Revolutionary Committee should include the left, the center, the right, and a few on the right’ and that ‘both the Council of Representatives and the Revolutionary Committee should have opposites’ (Mao, 2013a, p. 397). And the restriction on the political right was mainly that ‘it should not be centralized’ and ‘the Standing Committee should not have one’ (Mao, 2013a, p. 397). Thus when it came to individuals who could be categorized as bourgeois, Mao did not treat them as enemies of the revolution, but rather opposed those bourgeois elements who held the dominant power, and who could be tolerated once they had lost their influence in power.

The class struggle can be found not to be an activity of persecution of particular members of society, but primarily a political reshuffling of power patterns. However, a new problem arises: if what was being sought was merely a rearranging of power, Mao would not have needed to describe the revolution at the March 20, 1966 meeting as ‘an arduous, complex, and long-term struggle that will take decades or even centuries of effort’ (Mao, 2013a, p. 292). Even allowing for rhetorical exaggeration, there is no doubt that Mao saw the class struggle as a long-term activity. There must then exist a force that constantly threatens the power of the proletariat, and over a long period of time this cannot be the bourgeois elements with a limited lifespan, who are at best an expression of this force.

In May 1967, Mao Zedong discussed the importance of opposing the bourgeois idea of legal power, in which we can see the real goal of the class struggle. The bourgeois idea of legal power is manifested in the ‘struggle for status, struggle for rank, high wages for intellectual laborers and low wages for manual laborers’ (Mao, 2013b, p. 462) and the ‘take what you can get’ idea. It can be seen that the bourgeois idea of legal power is in fact a set of capitalist values, which includes the concepts of obedience to hierarchy, the superiority of intellectual labor over manual labor, and the principle of individualistic economic distribution.

When we look at the bourgeois idea of juridical power in conjunction with the activities in the Cultural Revolution, we can see why the bourgeois idea of juridical power was a more fundamental goal of the revolution. The management of students by officials and cadres in schools is seen as a manifestation of hierarchy, the fact that students only study in schools and do not participate in productive activities in the countryside is a manifestation of the superiority of intellectual over physical activities, and the higher salaries of officials and cadres than those of workers and peasants is a manifestation of the principle of individualistic economic distribution. All of the above phenomena are brought into order by the control of a political power.

It can be said that the bourgeois idea of juridical power is the cause of all the phenomena that the revolution is against, the cause of the system of power in which the bourgeoisie is in power, and that is why the bourgeois idea of juridical power, or the ideology of capitalism, is the target of the revolution, and that is why this revolution is called the Cultural Revolution. Thus capitalist and bourgeois knowledge became the cause of class struggle in the political sphere; knowledge produces power, and knowledge changes the way power operates by changing people’s perceptions.

Education under the guidance of the army and workers

The fact that Mao was a Marxist also meant that he could not ontologically treat bourgeois juridical thought as a superstructure as the ultimate factor; it was the social practices in the spheres of production, politics, and education that had the ultimate status, and it was they as the material environment that sustained bourgeois juridical thought. Thus Mao’s change in education was not an ideological reorganization of education, but a radical change in pedagogical practice.

The first was the militarization of educational activities; in a 1966 talk by Mao Zedong to teachers and students, Mao pointed out that teachers and students should ‘learn politics and military affairs from the People’s Liberation Army’ (Mao, 2013b, p. 153), and that by doing so, they could ‘strengthen organization and discipline’ (Mao, 2013b, p. 153). By the time Mao gave clearer instructions on military training in October 1966, students were now to be ‘organized into squads, platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, and divisions according to the formation of the PLA’, and the content of their military training was to ‘learn formation, the basic movements of the formation, and the footwork’ (Mao, 2013b, p. 126). The measures used by the army to train soldiers are now being applied to teachers and students in schools, representing a gradual militarization of discipline.

After the army, the working class also entered educational activities. In an August 1968 critique and revision of an article, Mao’s instructions were that ‘to realize the proletarian revolution in education, there must be working-class leadership and participation by the working masses’; and that ‘the workers’ propaganda teams must stay in the schools for a long time’; ‘Lead the schools forever’ (Mao, 2013c, p. 249). Thus it was not only the students who had to travel to the workplace, but also the working class, and the activities of the educational institutions came under the political leadership of the proletariat. An order of production was introduced into the school, and the discipline of the economic place followed.

Since revolution is a class struggle, the discipline and spirit of combat are necessary, and so the discipline of education needs to absorb the discipline of the military. Since the relationship between knowledge and power is healthy only when social practice is involved, the discipline of education needs to absorb the discipline of production. The change in the discipline of education during the Cultural Revolution was a reaction to the relationship between knowledge and power, and students internalized the relationship between knowledge and power under this discipline, thus becoming the successors of socialism.

Using research perspectives to draw conclusions

As with previous studies of education in ancient China, Mao’s texts possess distinct differences, and we can find themes as varied as the emphasis on the importance of labour in education, the call for class struggle and opposition to capitalist culture, and the demand for the involvement of workers, peasants and the military in educational activities. We can similarly find structural similarities between these texts through a lens that introduces knowledge and power. Knowledge is perceived as class and thus becomes an adjunct to the class struggle as an activity of political power; power also directly becomes knowledge, and the most necessary method of education for students is no longer specialised education but direct participation in production practices through which they acquire class identity on a political level. Discipline is very clearly manifested in the direct transfer of the disciplines received by the generals and workers to the students. The basic structure of knowledge and power in Chinese education, i.e. their homogeneity, manifests itself in an ideology centred on the philosophy of practice and the theory of value of labour.

Introducing the concept of discipline using the research perspective of this paper was much easier during the Cultural Revolution; the European influence was directly observable; the discipline of the modern army and the discipline of modern industry were both products of European industrial culture, which China partially embraced in the process of building socialism.

If we go on a quest to find out what connects practice, politics, and knowledge, the answers we are most likely to get are Marxist philosophy and Marxist political economy. The materialist ideology of the former gives the practical activities of the material world an ontologically high status, while the economic determinism of the latter focuses the practices of the material world on economically productive activities. This means that as Chinese society learns from European and American societies in some respects, the research perspective has to take more account of the structure of knowledge and power that European and American societies have already demonstrated when introducing knowledge and power.

In the study of ancient China, ephemerally distinct texts have demonstrated structural similarities in their co-temporal states. The same similarities can be found when we compare ancient China with modern China. The acquisition of knowledge by a gentleman in Confucianism is to participate in politics, while the acquisition of knowledge by a student in the Cultural Revolution is also to participate in politics. Knowledge is homogeneous with power in Chinese culture; knowledge is always subordinate to power, and power is always important to knowledge. It was by internalising such logic under the regulation that students became one of the most important forces in the Cultural Revolution.

Discussion: Education in contemporary China

We propose in this paper a new research perspective, one that builds on a focus on knowledge and power and tries to draw some preliminary conclusions about the state of co-occurrence in different periods through discourse analysis.

Applying discourse analysis to the study of Chinese education is a popular operation, with studies discussing the issue of educational justice in China by comparing the differences in the discourses of Chinese education in different periods (Zhou et al., 2018). It is also common to introduce Foucault’s concepts in the analysis, such as studies that reflect on Chinese education by introducing power and regulation (Han, 2023). We hope that the perspective of knowledge and power introduced in this paper can further assist researchers in their analytical work on Chinese education.

Studies devoted to Confucian education or, alternatively, to socialist education may argue that there is a contradiction between traditional Chinese education and socialist education in China, and this is certainly true. But better thinking about education in contemporary China requires an awareness of the joint influence of both, and some studies suggest that Confucianism and socialism may have jointly influenced the globalization of Chinese education (Wu and Robertson, 2024). We hope that our research on the structural similarities between co-temporal states in different periods can help people better recognize the homogeneity in educational phenomena.

When researchers stand on the basis of comparative pedagogy to study education in China and other countries, the specificity of Chinese society and Chinese culture is always an inextricable topic, and the differences between countries may negatively affect foreign students in China (Singh and kaur, 2023) or discriminate against Chinese students studying in the West (Moosavi, 2022). Even without considering the transnational mobility of educational members, simply comparing the outcomes produced by two different educational systems compels a comparison of the educational cultures of different countries (Marginson and Yang, 2022). The research perspective presented in this paper is one of co-occurrence, and we hope that this perspective will also help one to compare different co-occurrence under the same period of time, and that education is naturally structurally differentiated between China and other countries due to the fact that regulation takes place in different relations of knowledge and power.

Finally, let us reflect on a common phenomenon in China. Even though legally Chinese university students are adult citizens and there is no written agreement or constitutionally mandated decree restricting their personal freedom, Chinese university students are in practice subjected to a dormitory system that restricts their personal freedom. This system requires students to return to their dormitories on time and to register their long-distance travels, and is based primarily on administrative orders or regulations from the government. This demonstrates the incomplete awareness of rights among Chinese university students, and this active submission to public power can also be found in the study of university students’ personal privacy (Wen et al., 2023). This paper’s perspective on knowledge and power can also help people reflect on how educated people are regulated.

Conclusion

This paper proposes a new perspective for the study of Chinese education, one that requires the researcher to analyse the discourse of Chinese education, and in the process of discourse analysis to pay attention to how knowledge and power are combined in Chinese education. By introducing the concept of discipline, the researcher in this perspective can also find out how educated people internalise the relationship between knowledge and power in their own educational activities.

Using four ancient classics and the writings of a communist Chinese leader as the objects of study, this paper shows how the researcher can use the research perspective proposed in this paper. Research using this perspective can help the researcher to recognise the way in which knowledge and power exist in relation to each of the co-temporal states in which each of the research subjects is situated, and by comparing co-temporal states in different time periods, we can also arrive at the ephemerally significant finding of structural similarity between these co-temporal states.

For the findings of this paper, the structure of knowledge and power in Chinese education has a similarity that transcends generations. The structural similarity is crystallised in the homogeneity between knowledge and power, where knowledge becomes directly subordinate to power, and power itself can be taken as a kind of knowledge. In the discourse of Chinese education, researchers often find that knowledge in education serves political power, which itself becomes the knowledge that must be taught in any education, and the mechanism of regulation prompts individuals participating in educational activities to internalise the above relationship between knowledge and power in themselves, and education thus continuously produces knowledge as an appendage of politics, and politics as a discipline of knowledge. These are the conclusions that can be found in the initial application of the perspectives presented in this paper.

China’s long history has produced a great deal of written literature, and due to the limitations of the research paper this paper only uses a new research perspective on some of its best known members and draws very preliminary conclusions. By applying the research perspective to a larger or more valuable body of literature, the researcher may be able to draw more comprehensive and convincing conclusions. This paper was not able to do so all at once, and it is the author’s hope that by presenting a new perspective as a tool, future research can produce more perfect results on the issue of knowledge and power in education.

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The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes on contributors

Guo Zhou

Guo Zhou is an undergraduate student majoring in business administration at the School of Economics and Management, Nanjing Forestry University. Out of personal interest, the author devotes himself to personal research in the humanities and social sciences. The main area of his research so far has been cultural studies, but he keeps an open mind to other fields of history, sociology, and psychology. The author is looking for opportunities for master’s and doctoral education.