Comparing Political Socialization in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Perspectives on the Teaching and Learning of Citizenship.

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1 Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 11, No. 2: Comparing Political Socialization in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan Perspectives on the Teaching and Learning of Citizenship Pei-te Lien Abstract This essay addresses a research vacuum in comparative political studies by comparing the evolution and current status of citizenship education in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Each of the three Chinese-speaking societies represents a different stage of development and democratization in global politics. What do middle-school students socialized in these societies think about democracy, citizenship, and minority rights in the early part of the twenty-first century? What elements separate and unite them? After providing an overview of the major shifts in the paradigms of contemporary citizenship education in the respective societies, the essay employs both primary and secondary survey data associated with a leading survey on international civic and citizenship education to provide empirical answers to the research questions.* Keywords: Political socialization, citizenship education, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, student surveys. In the most recent volume of the Annual Review of Political Science, Gift and Wibbels observe that, with notable exceptions, education has been woefully understudied as a topic in comparative politics. A main reason for the paucity of research is the dearth of reliable data. Another reason is the disciplinary bias against studying topics that fall outside of traditional domains of political science. 1 Even if political socialization is a legitimate research domain in the Pei-te Lien is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. <plien@polsci.ucsb.edu> * This research was made possible by support from a UCSB Faculty Senate Research Grant as well as through support from the American Region of the Chiang-ching Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and the UCSB Institute of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research. An earlier version of the essay was presented at the Conference on Democratic Governance, Cross-Strait Security and Prosperity, sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Building, October 12-13, 2014, Washington, DC. 1 Thomas Gift and Erik Wibbels, Reading, Writing, and the Regrettable Status of Education Research in Comparative Politics, Annual Review of Political Science 17 (2014): December

2 discipline, it saw its heyday between the 1950s and the 1970s, when researchers were interested in understanding the generational transmission of political partisanship, sources of children s diffuse support for a political system, or the roots of student protests. 2 Torney-Puerta notes a renewed interest in the 1990s and urges consideration of political socialization as a complex, reciprocal, and situational process rather than a one-way causal relationship between socialization agents and youth behavioral outcomes. 3 She also comments that the availability of new comparative data on civic and citizenship education collected by the International Association for Evaluation of Education Achievement (IEA) may help advance interest in and research on comparative political education. This essay takes a crack at comparative education research by comparing the evolution and current status of citizenship education in the politically divided homelands of many Chinese Americans: mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It is followed by an analysis of student survey data recently collected by the author in southern China and previously by the IEA in Hong Kong and Taiwan under the auspices of the 2009 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS). A main purpose of this project is to help dispel myths about political socialization in contemporary Chinese-speaking societies by studying how citizenship education in the three societies has evolved over time and, in the early part of the twenty-first century, how middle or junior high school students in these societies compare to each other in their concepts of democracy, citizenship, and minority rights, or those concepts akin to the liberal democratic foundation of the United States. This topic has an added significance and urgency because of the recent waves of student protests for democracy and sovereignty in Hong Kong and Taiwan. According to data released by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Taiwan was ranked significantly higher than Hong Kong, which was ranked significantly higher than China, in the composite democracy index that consists of measures for political participation, the functioning of government, the electoral process and pluralism, political culture, and civil liberties. In 2010, the overall score for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China was 7.46, 5.92, and 3.14, respectively. The United States scored 8.11 in comparison. Based on the EIU scheme, the United States is considered a full democracy, Taiwan a flawed democracy, Hong Kong a hybrid regime with partial democracy, and China an authoritarian regime. 4 Powerful statistics like these are useful to challenge 2 M. Kent Jennings and Richard Niemi, The Political Character of Adolescence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974); David Easton and Jack Dennis, Children in the Political System (New York: McGraw Hill, 1969); and Samuel Barnes and Max Kasse, Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979). 3 Judith Torney-Puerta, Comparative Perspectives on Political Socialization and Civic Education, Comparative Education Review 44, no. 1 (2000): The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited, Democracy Index 2010: Democracy in Retreat (London: Economist Group, 2011). 110 Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 11, No. 2

3 the sensational, demeaning, and one-dimensional characterizations of the political socialization of immigrants from the three societies in East Asia. However, these statistics are insufficient and inadequate to capture nuanced cultural trends and profound sociopolitical changes within each of the societies over time. This study addresses these deficiencies by comparing school-based political learning across time and space in the three societies through the employment of both macro- and micro-approaches to configure the changing content and contours of each polity s citizenship education. The following sections begin with an overview of the changing meanings, goals, curricula guidelines, and pedagogies of citizenship education in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan over the last half century. Empirical student survey data collected from Hong Kong and Taiwan by the IEA under the auspices of the 2009 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study are analyzed side by side with new comparable student data collected by the author with the assistance of colleagues in southern China, in order to help identify similarities and differences in opinion patterns across societies. Studying how notions of citizenship are taught and learned in each society helps to better appraise the dimensions of democratic orientation as well as the challenges and potentials for democratic citizenship, as reflected in the political learning of students in these East Asian societies. Citizenship Education in East Asia: A Multifaceted and Flexible Phenomenon The term civic and citizenship education (citizenship education, hereafter) may broadly refer to the formation through the process of schooling of the knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions of citizens. 5 Modern states employ citizenship education as a strategy to support their values, structures, and priorities. A leading expert notes that citizenship education not only cannot be treated in isolation from the broader global environment, 6 but also cannot stand by itself, independent of cultural norms, political priorities, social expectations, national economic development aspirations, geopolitical 5 This definition is used in John J. Cogan, Paul Morris, and Murray Print, eds., Civic Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Case Studies across Six Societies (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002), 4. The authors refer to it as civic education, which is used interchangeably with citizenship education in this study. In their research on international civic and citizenship education, Schulz et al. note that the prevailing global trend is to use the term citizenship education to capture the dynamic process and growing field of study. Wolfram Schulz, John Ainley, Julian Fraillon, David Kerr, and Bruno Losito, ICCS 2009 International Report: Civic Knowledge, Attitudes, and Engagement among Lower Secondary School Students in 38 Countries (Amsterdam: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 2010). 6 Kerry J. Kennedy, Global Trends in Civic and Citizenship Education: What Are the Lessons for Nation States? Education Sciences 2 (2012): 127. December

4 contexts and historical antecedents. 7 Political entities in the world, including those in the Asian region, have shown a revived interest in reforming civic and/ or citizenship education so as to better respond to profound challenges imposed by significant social and political changes on both domestic and international fronts over recent decades. 8 Because education is shaped largely by political forces, the curriculum content, core values, and pedagogies of citizenship education in each society have been found to reflect social changes and the prevailing political ideology. 9 In East Asia, citizenship education has been called, alternatively, political, ideological, moral, or civic education. The various expressions in each society convey the strategic function of citizenship education as a tool for inculcating (future) citizens and for instilling desirable political identities and other qualities of citizenship that are considered crucial to the stability of a political system. Paradoxically, citizenship education has been assigned the mission of preparing critically thinking, responsible, participating, multidimensional citizens, while also being used to instill a sense of national identity, loyalty to the nation-state, and patriotism. 10 This duality of function should be considered a part of the definition of citizenship education rather than a contradiction of roles. As a tool of governance, citizenship education has been used to bolster both democratic and antidemocratic regimes-in both cases, in the name of cultivating good members of society. In a useful overview of the conceptions of citizenship and citizenship education in Asia, Lee notes that the concept of Asian citizenship is emergent rather than fixed, with some degree of fluidity, unpredictability, and eclecticism. 11 Although Asian societies commonly thought to be of Confucian 7 Kerry J. Kennedy, Searching for Citizenship Values in an Uncertain Global Environment, in Citizenship Education in Asia and the Pacific: Concepts and Issues, ed. Wing On Lee, David L. Grossman, Kerry J. Kennedy, and Gregory P. Fairbrother (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers and Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong, 2004), Bray Mark and Wing On Lee, eds., Education and Political Transition: Themes and Experiences in East Asia, 2 nd ed. (Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong, 2001). 9 Paul Morris, Flora Kan, and Esther Morris, Education, Civic Participation and Identity: Continuity and Change in Hong Kong, in Education and Political Transition: Themes and Experiences in East Asia, 2 nd ed., ed. Mark Bray and Wing On Lee (Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong, 2001), ; Kerry Kennedy, Wing On Lee, and David Grossman, eds., Citizenship Pedagogies in Asia and the Pacific (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer/Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong, 2010). 10 Yan Wing Leung and Murray Print, Nationalistic Education as the Focus for Civics and Citizenship Education: The Case of Hong Kong, Asia Pacific Education Review 3 (2002): Wing On Lee, Multiple Modalities of Asia-Pacific Citizenship Pedagogies: Eclectic Concepts, Hybridized Approaches and Teachers Preferences, in Citizenship Pedagogies in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Kerry Kennedy, Wing On Lee, and David Grossman (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer/Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong, 2010), Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 11, No. 2

5 heritage 12 tend to emphasize the values of collectivity, responsibility, and social harmony, Lee maintains that, rather than a dichotomy, Asians see the relationship between the individual and the collectivity as two sides of a coin in terms of citizenship. 13 Thus, while the West discussed individualism in terms of individual rights, individuation and individual responsibility in the course of its political development, the East may have focused upon the development of individuality or self-enrichment which may or may not lead to political ends. 14 This relatively apolitical orientation is said to have explained the acceptance and persistence of soft authoritarianism and soft democracy in Confucian Asia. 15 However, the causal relationship between Confucian ideals and a depoliticized civic education has been challenged recently by Leung and Yuen in their study of civic education curricula in Hong Kong. 16 The unfolding of student protests in recent years also provides a forceful antithesis to the assumption of political apathy. Differences in the socioeconomic development and stages of democratization across societies also suggest likely differences in the concepts of democracy and citizenship and in the approaches to the cultivation of good citizenship. Comparing how East Asian adults view democracy, contributing authors to Chu et al. note that, in Taiwan, the largest proportion of respondents understands democracy as freedom and liberty" and "political rights, institutions, and processes. 17 In Hong Kong, the largest share of respondents also understands democracy in terms of freedom and liberty. However, their notion of democracy is hybrid, incorporating liberal, institutional, and substantive values drawn from both Western notions of individualism and traditional Chinese understandings of good government (minben). In China, perhaps reflecting successful indoctrination in a socialist democracy, respondents view their system as the most democratic compared to other East Asian states, even if the Chinese system does not condone Western-style 12 The term Confucian heritage is used to broadly refer to the traditional cultures originally linked to the class teachings by Confucius ( B.C.) in ancient China. Over time, the term encompassed a vast, interconnected system of philosophies, rituals, habits, and practices that cannot be attributed only to Confucianism, which itself has varied meanings and connotations in each of the societies in question. Thanks are owed to an anonymous reviewer for this important point. 13 Wing On Lee, Emerging Concepts of Citizenship in the Asian Context, in Citizenship Education in Asia and the Pacific: Concepts and Issues, ed. Wing Ong Lee et al. (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers and Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong, 2004), Ibid., But see note 12 on the broad usage of Confucian in this writing. 16 Yan Wing Leung and Timothy Yuen, Competition between Politicized and Depoliticized Versions of Civic Education Curricula: The Case of Hong Kong, Citizenship, Social and Economics Education 11, no. 1 (2012): Yun Han Chu, Larry Diamond, Andrew Nathan, and Doh Chull Shin, eds., How East Asians View Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). December

6 political competition and separation of powers. The Chinese also have more trust in their political institutions and are more optimistic about the democratic prospects of their system. Alvin So studied the formation of the concept of citizenship in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and noted that there were many different configurations of civic, political, and social rights. 18 In mainland China, socialist citizenship of the Maoist era was replaced by market citizenship after In Taiwan, social and political changes in the mid- to late 1980s led to a shift from an understanding of citizenship as requiring conformity to one supporting concepts of liberal democracy. In Hong Kong, the handover in 1997 was a watershed event that separated the colonial citizenship of the past from the enterprising citizenship and nationalistic citizenship after the transition. Goldman and Perry remind readers that, reflecting the British legacy, Hong Kong s version of citizenship is based on legal rights, sustained by an independent judiciary and the vigilance of civil society, whereas in Taiwan, people acquire democratic citizenship by means of popular protests, competitive elections, a multiparty system, and a free press. 19 The Hong Kong and Taiwan cases illustrate the possibility of formulating a Chinese version of citizenship based on principles more akin to those found in Western liberal democracies rather than on collectivist and conformist understandings of citizenship in various areas of East Asia. Even in the People s Republic of China (PRC), decades of economic and social changes in the post-reform era have resulted in significant educational transformation and raised possibilities of convergence with certain values and ideas of democracy and citizenship that are practiced in other societies. Yet, buoyed by the success of its economic reform, the Chinese government also has been reinventing its brand of socialism by reviving Confucianism as a new nationalistic discourse to help fortify its authoritarianism. 20 Before assessing empirical evidence from student surveys, a brief review is provided below of the milestone changes in citizenship education in each of the three Chinese-speaking societies to help anticipate and interpret survey findings. Development of Citizenship Education in Mainland China Because terms such as civic, citizenry, and citizenship are still associated with Western civilization and remain controversial when linked to education 18 Alvin Y. So, One Country, Three Systems? State, Nation, and Civil Society in the Making of Citizenship in the Chinese Triangle of Mainland-Taiwan-Hong Kong, in Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong: Community, Nation and the Global City, ed. Agnes S. Ku and Ngai Pun (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), Merle Goldman and Elizabeth Perry, eds., Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 20 Kelvin Chi-kin Cheung, Away from Socialism, towards Chinese Characteristics: Confucianism and the Future of Chinese Nationalism, China Information 26, no. 2 (2012): Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 11, No. 2

7 in China today, citizenship education in China is more commonly known as moral education, even if it has been used interchangeably with ideological or political education. Citizenship education in the PRC can be broken down into three primary periods. According to Zhong and Lee, the early years of citizenship education ( ) were politically-oriented, based on Marxist-Leninist ideology, and the teaching of current affairs was dominated by anti-americanism. 21 Zhao and Tan note that, in the Mao or pre-1980 era, the ideological and political functions of education were emphasized. 22 During the Cultural Revolution ( ), citizenship education was carried out mainly through learning the selected works of Mao and by underscoring individual obligations to the state and society as well as loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Zhong and Lee characterize the second period as politically and morally oriented. 23 Between the adoption of the open door policy and economic reform in 1978 until the early 1990s, analysis of education documents issued by the Central Committee of the CCP shows frequent debates over policy issues and shifting stress of moral education in the context of ideological debates. 24 Because Maoism still occupied a significant place in China s educational curriculum, Lee comments that China s education policies were characterized more by continuity than by change during this period, tending to swing toward liberalization, in general. 25 In addition, the type of continuity that can be tracked is along the line of student-centered pedagogy, which was variously expressed in such terms as developmental needs of students, self-initiatives, self-education, independent thinking, and rational teaching, etc. 26 These traits of openness in moral education were revealed not only in teaching approaches but also in the educational system itself, which invariably involved tension between orientation toward centralization or deregulation. In the third period (since 1993) when moral education is equivalent to citizenship education in China, Lee and Ho report a clear separation from the ideological past, as concepts such as democracy, laws, citizenship, cultural 21 Minghua Zhong and Wing On Lee, Citizenship Curriculum in China: A Shifting Discourse towards Chinese Democracy, Law Education and Psychological Health, in Citizenship Curriculum in Asia and the Pacific, ed. David L. Grossman, Wing On Lee, and Kerry Kennedy (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer/Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong, 2008), Minghua Zhong and Chuanbao Tan, Citizenship Education in Mainland China at a Crossroad, in Critical Perspectives on Values Education in Asia, ed. Charlene Tan and Kim-chong Chong (Singapore: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007). 23 Zhong and Lee, Citizenship Curriculum in China. 24 Wing On Lee, Teachers Perception of Citizenship in China, in Education for Social Citizenship: Perceptions of Teachers in the USA, Australia, England, Russia and China, ed. Wing On Lee and Jeffrey T. Fouts (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), Ibid. 26 Ibid. December

8 identity, and psychological health are being incorporated into the curriculum. 27 Nevertheless, patriotism and (state) nationalism remain core to the development of citizenship for students in China. 28 The release of the Action Plan for the Development of Civic Morality in 2001 pushed moral education onto a more prominent stage, with the citizenry and government emerging as an important social relationship in addressing sociopolitical issues. 29 New pluralistic ideologies, based on the claims of the CCP to represent all sectors of society and to promote individual rights and rule by law, have supplemented justifications for legitimacy based on nationality. 30 Some scholars also observe a profound paradigm shift in citizenship pedagogies that veer away from a traditional teacher-centered approach in preference for one that promotes a participatory style of teaching and experience-based learning. 31 Summarizing the changes found in middle-school textbooks between 1997 and 2005, Tse notes that, different from the Mao era, the new ideology is characterized by the broadening scope of moral education, diversification of pedagogical methods, the persistence of national education policy in a socialist direction and a conditional adjustment of the state-defined individual collective relationship in which teachers and students have a greater but still limited autonomy. Reviewing the sharp rise of Chinese literature on citizenship education published between 2001 and 2012, Zhao argues that China s frequent policy shifts and ongoing debates about citizenship education are deeply rooted in China s structural transformation after 1978, when society and the state started to forge separate identities and ideopolitical and moral education each began to occupy different ideoscapes. 33 Thus, moral education is considered more relevant to indigenous Chinese culture and more individualfocused, while citizenship education appears to accommodate a modern, market-dominated society. 34 In addition, China s rapid rise and increasingly 27 Wing On Lee and Chi-hang Ho, Citizenship Education in China: Changing Concepts, Approaches and Policies in the Changing Political, Economic, and Social Context, in The Sage Handbook of Education for Citizenship and Democracy, ed. James Arthur, Ian Davies, and Carole Hahn (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2008), Gregory P. Fairbrother, Citizenship Education in a Divided China, , Asia Pacific Journal of Education 24, no. 1 (2004): Zhenzhou Zhao, The Shaping of Citizenship Education in a Chinese Context, Frontiers of Education in China 8, no. 1 (2013): Gregory P. Fairbrother, Rethinking Hegemony and Resistance to Political Education in Mainland China and Hong Kong, Comparative Education Review 52 (2008): Zhenzhou Zhao and Gregory P. Fairbrother, Pedagogies of Cultural Integration in Chinese Citizenship Education, in Citizenship Pedagogies in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Kerry Kennedy, Wing On Lee, and David Grossman (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer/Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong, 2010), Thomas Kwan Choi Tse, Creating Good Citizens in China: Comparing Grade 7-9 School Textbooks, , Journal of Moral Education 40, no. 2 (2011): Zhao, The Shaping of Citizenship Education in a Chinese Context. 34 Ibid., Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 11, No. 2

9 important involvement in the globalization process have created the need for global citizenship education. However, Zhao is convinced that the pressing challenge for citizenship education in China is to develop a public sphere that can mediate the growing tensions between society and the state. The current discrepancy in the meaning of citizenship as understood by society and by the state is documented in Chen s analysis of the term gongmin (citizen/ citizenship) used by two major but distinct Chinese newspapers. 35 Whereas societal discourses tend to underscore the rights of citizenship, the terminology used by the state highlights the responsibilities and obligations of citizenship. Development of Citizenship Education in Hong Kong Hong Kong was a small fishing village when it was ceded to the United Kingdom by Imperial China in the early 1840s. The territory that now encompasses Hong Kong was occupied by Japan from 1941 to It became a Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People s Republic of China when the British government handed over sovereignty in The development of citizenship education in contemporary Hong Kong also can be divided into three phases: (1) before 1984: denationalization and depoliticization by the state and the schools; (2) : politicization and democratization of the intended curriculum; and (3) 1997 and onward: nationalization and redepoliticization of civic education and official confirmation of nationalistic education. Leung and Ng call the third phase back to square one of depoliticization. 36 However, there is a sharp contrast between the first and the third phases in terms of national citizenship and identity. According to Tsang, the British system of common law and an independent judiciary was instituted during the first decade of British rule to protect the civil rights, especially the property rights, of British merchants. 37 Over the years, the rule of law became the custodian of civil rights and the people of Hong Kong were able to enjoy a large amount of political freedom. However, the development of citizenship rights was under the patronage of, or tight control of, the colonial regime. Before the 1980s, the political culture of Hong Kong was built upon the politics of social accommodation, which relied on traditional familial social networks rather than on state bureaucracy to accommodate individual needs. 38 The colonial regime started to play an 35 Sicong Chen, The Discrepancy of Meaning of Citizenship between the State and Society in China: Implications for Citizenship Education and Policymaking, Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 8, no. 3 (2013): Leung Yan Wing and Shun Wing Ng, Back to Square One: The Re-depoliticizing of Civic Education in Hong Kong, Asia Pacific Journal of Education 24, no. 1 (2004): Wing-Kwong Tsang, Patronage, Domestication or Empowerment? Citizenship Development and Citizenship Education in Hong Kong, in Citizenship and Citizenship Education in a Changing World, ed. Orit Ichilov (London: Woburn Press, 1998), Ibid., 223. December

10 active role in regulating economic and social affairs in the 1970s. This growing state intervention in communal affairs activated the politically aloof society, resulting in the rise of pressure groups around the mid-1970s. During the colonial era, citizenship education was conformist and depoliticized. Hong Kong residents sense of distrust of the PRC government grew when they felt ignored in the bilateral negotiations between the British and the PRC government about Hong Kong s future after During the build-up in the 1980s and 1990s to the reintegration with China, there was a mounting demand from society for strengthening citizenship education in the schools curricula to prepare future citizens for self-rule. 39 As a result of the active involvement of the British state and civil society, citizenship education took a large stride between 1984 and 1995 in the direction of democratic education, focusing on the civil, political, and social rights of citizens and their active participation in the political process. Christopher Patten, who governed Hong Kong between 1992 and 1997, introduced a package of electoral reforms in the Legislative Council that aimed to enlarge the electorate and enfranchise citizens of Hong Kong to make decisions regarding their future. The Basic Law of Hong Kong, promulgated in 1990 by Yang Shangkun, then president of the PRC, and previously publicized in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, lays out the One Country, Two Systems principle. This principle ostensibly permits the HKSAR to keep its legal and political system and retain its free-market system and way of life for a period of fifty years until A number of freedoms (press, religion, and association) and rights of Hong Kong residents that were enjoyed by the former British subjects purportedly are protected under the Basic Law. In part due to a prolonged transition period leading to the handover as well as to the conservative constitutional framework stipulated in the Basic Law, Hong Kong s opportunity to pursue a reform agenda to decolonize education has been constrained by the perceived need to promote an image of stability and continuity after the handover. 40 Following the resumption of Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the local Hong Kong government introduced a new national education project aimed at building nationalism and patriotism. Tse notes that, with the active involvement of the state and civil society in promoting national education in recent years, there have been certain drastic changes in the school system-reforms in the curriculum with more weight given to national identity and China-related 39 Thomas Kwan Choi Tse, Civic and Political Education, in Education and Society in Hong Kong and Macao: Comparative Perspectives on Continuity and Change, 2 nd ed., ed. Mark Bray and Ramsey Koo (Hong Kong: CERC Studies in Comparative Education, University of Hong Kong, Springer, 2005), Paul Morris, Flora Kan, and Esther Morris, Education, Civic Participation and Identity: Continuity and Change in Hong Kong, in Education and Political Transition: Themes and Experiences in East Asia, 2 nd ed., ed. Mark Bray and Wing On Lee (Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong, 2001), Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 11, No. 2

11 topics, more nationalistic or patriotic extra-curricular activities and rituals, and more training for teachers to conduct national education. 41 In other writing, Tse laments, the current practices have exhibited a striking continuity with the stunted version of citizenry that existed in the colonial era. What has been transmitted to students is still conformist in nature, detaching students from the real politics of the society and the school. 42 He is concerned that, presently, too much attention is paid to satisfying the political need for national reintegration and to economic considerations in a globally competitive world, and cautions that education runs the risk of fulfilling political and economic imperatives instead of humanistic and democratic concerns. 43 Tse is certainly not alone in his premonition of the impact of the change in emphasis on the development of self-governance and social transformation in Hong Kong, as evidenced by the 2012 protests against the implementation of national education and the 2014 protests against restrictive election rules slated for Development of Citizenship Education in Taiwan It has been observed that, in Taiwan, the development of citizenship education reflects prevailing ideology, which underwent profound changes because of the island s political transformation in the 1980s. Scholarship on civic or citizenship education in Taiwan has reported paradigm shifts in curricula and pedagogies in response to forces for liberalization, decolonization, localization/ nativization, and globalization. 44 The concept of citizenship, the goals of 41 Thomas Kwan Choi Tse, Remaking Chinese Identity: Hegemonic Struggles over National Education in Post-Colonial Hong Kong, International Studies in Sociology of Education 17, no. 3 (2007): Thomas Kwan Choi Tse, Civic Education and Its Politics in Hong Kong, in Globalization, the Nation-State and the Citizen: Dilemmas and Directions for Civics and Citizenship Education, ed. Alan Reid, Judith Gill, and Alan Sears (New York: Routledge, 2010), Ibid. 44 Yi-rong Young, The Development of Political Education Policy in Taiwan, in Civic Education Policies in the Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan-Theory and Practice (in Chinese), ed. Jane Lee and Tian Linzhu (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong, 1998), 55-62; Christopher Hughes and Robert Stone, Nation-Building and Curriculum Reform in Hong Kong and Taiwan, China Quarterly 160 (1999): ; Jyh-jia Chen, Reforming Textbooks, Reshaping School Knowledge: Taiwan s Textbook Deregulation in the 1990s, Journal of Pedagogy, Culture & Society 10 (2002): 39-72; Wing-hwa Law, Globalization and Citizenship Education in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Comparative Education Review 48, no. 3 (2004): ; Meihui Liu, A Society in Transition: The Paradigm Shift of Civic Education in Taiwan, in Citizenship Education in Asia and the Pacific: Concepts and Issues, ed. Wing Ong Lee et al. (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers and Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong, 2004), ; and Shiowlan Doong, Taiwan s New Citizenship Curriculum: Changes and Challenges, in Citizenship Curriculum in Asia and the Pacific, ed. David L. Grossman et al. (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer/Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong, 2008), December

12 citizenship education, the creation of curriculum, the production and adoption of textbooks, the methods of teacher training and teaching, as well as matters concerning student admissions all have been overhauled in recent decades. During Japanese rule ( ), the primary goal of common education in Taiwan was to serve the campaign of Nipponization by cultivating loyalty to the Japanese Emperor, familiarizing all children with the Japanese language, developing a satisfactory work ethic, and instilling basic knowledge of math and the sciences. 45 Efforts by the Japanese to stifle indigenous identity contributed to the emergence of Taiwanese consciousness among locals. 46 However, the development of Taiwan as a model colony bore witness to massive modernization efforts by the Japanese through constructing an economic infrastructure and industrial base, nurturing the rule of law, establishing a modern and tight-knit governing system through the household registration system, and spreading modern knowledge about health and hygiene. This mixed legacy of Japanese colonialism has complicated the process of decolonization until today, and has contributed significantly to the rift in identity politics in contemporary Taiwan. Whether and how to introduce and interpret Japanese colonial influence on Taiwan became a source of great dispute in various curriculum reform efforts, such as a new course Knowing Taiwan offered at the junior high level in 1997 and, more recently, in the revision of curriculum guidelines for senior high school history in February Between 1945 and 1988, the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) government sought to maintain its legitimacy by using schools to forge a national identity and promote an ideology featuring Fa-tung (constitutional governance) as well as the ultimate recovery of the Chinese mainland, considered stolen by the CCP in Citing the need for national survival and ideological consolidation, the state adopted a highly centralized administration system to enforce its goals in education. The adoption of Chinese nationalism and Dr. Sun Yat-sen s philosophy of the Three Principles of the People (nationalism, 45 Patricia Tsurumi, Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 46 Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California, 2001), and Ping-hui Liao and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, : History, Culture, Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 47 Stephane Corcuff, History Textbooks, Identity Politics, and Ethnic Introspection in Taiwan: The June 1997 Knowing Taiwan Textbooks Controversy and the Questions It Raised on the Various Approaches to Han Identity, in History Education and National Identity in East Asia, ed., Edward Vickers and Alisa Jones (New York: Routledge, 2005), , and Fu-chang Wang, Why Bother about School Textbooks? An Analysis of the Origin of the Disputes over Renshi Taiwan Textbooks in 1997, in Cultural, Ethnic, and Political Nationalism in Contemporary Taiwan: Bentuhua, ed. John Makeham and A-chin Hsiau (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Chen, Reforming Textbooks, Reshaping School Knowledge. 120 Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 11, No. 2

13 democracy, and prosperity) were associated with the KMT s tight authoritarian rule. Following the improvement in relations between the United States and China in the early 1970s and the loss of Taiwan s seat in the United Nations, democracy was promoted in authoritarian Taiwan as a value in juxtaposition to totalitarian China. The focus of teaching democratic values was on the inculcation of basic rights and freedoms of the individual, not on the rights to dissent and engage in democratic decision-making. 49 A milestone event in civic education in Taiwan occurred in 2001, as a new field of social studies was established to integrate knowledge of history, geography, and social studies taught previously under separate disciplines. 50 Under the Integrated Nine-Year General Curricula for elementary and junior high schools, the new curriculum in civic education emphasizes the thinking and approaches to learning of social science by incorporating elements of six disciplines. Emphasis is placed on teaching the essence of democracy, such as participation in the democratic process, the right of dissent, checks and balances, and democratic decision-making. 51 The curriculum also stresses the values of individualism, social diversity, and minority rights, as well as the distinctiveness of Taiwan as part of the tripartite framework of national identity education. At the senior high level, designers of the curriculum guidelines also have striven to link civic and citizenship education directly with the teaching of democratic values, critical thinking skills, and the importance of participation in democratic decision-making. 52 To negotiate a changed political climate under democratization and foster consciousness of being Taiwanese, proponents of curriculum reform have pursued the separation of political identity from cultural identity, and the creation, in turn, of a tripartite local-national-international identity in citizenship education. There were two major shifts in the curriculum focus of the education reform movement of the 1990s-localization (nativization or indigenization) and globalization. 53 Since the movement s inception, in place of Chinese nationalism, there has been a greater emphasis on the multicultural origins of Taiwan, the role of women, the indigenous or aboriginal peoples and their cultures, and how the inhabitants of Taiwan may be connected to and 49 Meihui Liu, Civics Education in Taiwan: Values Promoted in the Civics Curriculum, Asia Pacific Journal of Education 20, no. 1 (2000): Doong, Taiwan s New Citizenship Curriculum. 51 Liu, A Society in Transition, Mau-kuei Chang, Democratization and Civic Education Reform in Taiwan, speech delivered at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Pacific Circle Consortium Conference, Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan, May 26, Mei-hui Liu and Li-ching Hung, Identity Issues in Taiwan s History Curriculum, International Journal of Educational Research 37 (2002): ; Law, Globalization and Citizenship Education in Hong Kong and Taiwan ; and Liu, A Society in Transition. December

14 affected by global networks. 54 Although Taiwanese nationalism may seem to be the popular ethos in post-reform Taiwan, some observers argue that its content is much less about ethnic nationalism or the pursuit of independence than about civic nationalism, most especially the preservation of Taiwan s democratic and sovereign status quo. 55 Despite a continuing scuffle between major parties over national identity, among the public there seems to be a common desire to develop a participatory civic culture based on nativization or localization in Taiwan. 56 The Sunflower Movement of spring 2014 demonstrated civic nationalism at work, as college students who supported the preservation of Taiwan s democracy and sovereignty challenged the legitimacy of the ruling regime s trade deal with China by occupying the legislative chamber for two months. The above discussion shows a clear symbiotic relationship among society, politics, and citizenship education that is still evolving. Although the three societies arguably share some common cultural heritage as well as their emphasis on the instrumental role of citizenship education in managing national identity politics, each society has endured significant transformations in the notion of citizenship and the pedagogies of citizenship education that reflect monumental sociopolitical transformations and changing identity politics. In the end, citizenship education in Taiwan appears to have developed into a model that is closest to what one would expect in a Western liberal democracy. Despite a strong tradition of British rule of law in Hong Kong and the SAR s desire to maintain prosperity, its citizenship education is being challenged by the imperatives imposed by the Chinese government to develop a nationalistic identity and orientation. In China, rapid economic growth and the need to compete in a global market have triggered liberalization of the concept of citizenship as well as adoption of more pluralistic pedagogies of citizenship education. However, the state also has tightened its reign over society through the revival and teaching of Confucianism in moral education. 54 Mao Chin-ju, Fashioning Curriculum Reform as Identity Politics-Taiwan s Dilemma of Curriculum Reform in the New Millennium, International Journal of Educational Development 28 (2008): , and Law, Globalization and Citizenship Education in Hong Kong and Taiwan. 55 Gunter Schubert, Towards the End of a Long Journey: Assessing the Debate on Taiwanese Nationalism and National Identity in the Democratic Era, ASIEN 98 (2006): 26-44; Frank Muyard, Taiwanese National Identity, Cross-Strait Economic Interaction, and the Integration Paradigm, in National Identity and Economic Interest: Taiwan s Competing Options and Their Implications for Regional Stability, ed. Peter Chow (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), ; and Naiteh Wu, Will Economic Integration Lead to Political Assimilation, in National Identity and Economic Interest: Taiwan s Competing Options and Their Implications for Regional Stability, ed. Peter Chow (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Christopher Hughes, Negotiating National Identity in Taiwan: Between Nativization and De-sinicization, in Taiwan s Democracy: Economic and Political Challenges, ed. Robert Ash, John W. Garver, and Penelope B. Prime (New York: Routledge, 2011), Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 11, No. 2

15 Thus, despite China s considerable improvements in citizenship rights in the post-reform era, Janoski notes that the advances have been in the areas of legal and social rights, but not so much in regard to political rights. 57 Data and Methodology In the early part of the twenty-first century, to what extent have recent developments in citizenship education in each society been reflected in students perceptions of democratic values and beliefs as well as in their concepts of good citizenship and minority rights? And what elements of citizenship unite or separate the students in the three societies? We answer these questions by employing, in part, data from the 2009 ICCS organized by the IEA. 58 The 2009 ICCS is the third major international data gathering effort on civic and citizenship education (following the two pioneer studies in 1971 and 1999). There are a total of thirty-eight countries or places in the 2009 round, including Taiwan and Hong Kong but not China. To mend the data gap on China, and to facilitate international comparison across the three Chinese-speaking societies, I collaborated with colleagues from a leading teachers college in southern China to collect comparable student data. We used survey modules adapted from the ICCS, but translated into Chinese by fully bilingual members of the American research team and verified by colleagues in China. Data for the 2009 ICCS student survey from Taiwan were collected from 5,167 eighth graders or fourteen-year-olds in 150 schools on the island under the designation of Chinese Taipei. In Hong Kong, comparable data were collected from 2,902 eighth graders in seventy-six schools. 59 Comparable data from China were collected in the southern province of Guangdong, especially in the capital city of Guangzhou. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Cantonesespeaking immigrants from Guangdong have been the dominant face and voice of Chinese American history. Although surveying student opinions from this region can provide only a glimpse into what junior high students in China think about democracy and citizenship, we hope to use the research as a launching pad for gathering in a systematic manner more large-scale student opinion in China. About 1,700 copies of this study s survey questionnaire, printed in simplified Chinese, were distributed to subject teachers in fourteen junior 57 Thomas Janoski, Citizenship in China: A Comparison of Rights with the East and West, Journal of Chinese Political Science 19, no. 4 (2014): Both the ICCS 2009 International Report by Schulz et al. and the raw survey data released by the IEA in 2011 were consulted for this report. 59 Because only seventy-six of the possible 108 schools participated, which failed to meet the minimum sampling requirements (of 85 percent of the selected schools and 85 percent of the selected students within the participating schools), caution was raised by Schulz et al. about the representativeness of the data from Hong Kong. December

16 high schools in Guangdong province. These in-service teachers themselves were students in a continuing education master s degree program, supervised by one of the collaborators in China. Citing their curiosity about the results, these teachers volunteered to help administer the surveys to their eight-grade students in their citizenship education classes (called Ideology and Morality in China). The survey was administered to students between December 1, 2013, and January 15, Eleven of the fourteen teachers returned the survey questionnaires. Two master s degree students of education at South China Normal University (SCNU) helped to coordinate data dissemination, procurement, and preliminary data entry. The total number of valid responses from China was 1,379. Although the Chinese data were collected four years later than the data in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and restricted to a particular region of China, this survey is probably the first that utilizes a comprehensive and carefully designed survey instrument to advance knowledge of the teaching and learning of (liberal democratic) citizenship as well as facilitate comparison across systems around the globe. Doubts have been raised by survey researchers about the possibility and validity of gathering voluntary public opinion in China. It is possible that respondents do not feel free to express their true (dissenting) opinion under the authoritarian regime. However, past studies of adult response patterns in the context of large-scale cross-national surveys (e.g., Asian Barometer Survey and World Values Survey) have not found substantial evidence of political wariness among respondents in authoritarian regimes. 60 We also underscored the academic purpose of this international project, ensured objectivity and anonymity to our respondents, and stressed the importance of having candid responses for scientific research. Before reporting the main survey findings, it is worthwhile to consider a few observations concerning the demographic backgrounds of student participants. About half of the respondents were female. Nearly all of the students in Taiwan had parents born in Taiwan, but no more than half of the student participants in Hong Kong or Guangdong could say that their parents were born locally. Close to two-thirds of the students in Guangdong and over two-thirds of the students in Hong Kong, but fewer than half of the students in Taiwan, said that their parents were very or quite interested in political and social issues. When asked about their parents highest level of education, a higher proportion of students in Guangdong than in Hong Kong or Taiwan indicated that their parents had finished a four-year college or earned a post-graduate degree. The reverse was true when looking at the proportion of high school graduates among parents in each locality. The relatively elitist parental educational background of 60 Tianjian Shi, Cultural Values and Political Trust: A Comparison of the People s Republic of China and Taiwan, Comparative Politics 33 (2001): , and Tianjian Shi and Diqing Lou, Subjective Evaluation of Changes in Civil Liberties and Political Rights in China, Journal of Contemporary China 19, no. 3 (2010): Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 11, No. 2