Asian Education Podcast

The plight of the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar has largely been forgotten in recent years, as global attention has turned to crises in other regions. But hundreds of thousands of Rohingya remain displaced and effectively stateless, with the largest number (around a million) in Bangladesh.

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Yeshim Iqbal, Senior Research Scientist at Global TIES (Transforming Intervention Effectiveness and Scale) for Children, New York University. Dr. Iqbal has been closely involved in work that Global TIES has conducted with Rohingya communities in Bangladesh. She is also the founder and director of a suicide prevention hotline for children in Bangladesh.

TIES research has sites all over the world, two of them in Asia - Bangladesh and Myanmar. The projects it conducts are mostly related to childhood education in crisis-affected communities, although TIES is a research organisation rather than an educational provider. In this conversation, we focus on the work done by TIES with Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazaar, in southern Bangladesh.

The Rohingya arrived in southeastern Bangladesh in large numbers in 2016-17, having been forced to flee their homes in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, just across the border. Yeshim tells us that they are currently the world’s largest group of forcibly-displaced people living in one place (although there must be competition for that status from Palestinians and groups in southern Sudan, amongst others).

The TIES team conducted an ethnographic study of children in the Rohingya camps in southern Bangladesh. This involved examining and evaluating a ‘play to learn’ programme organised by the BRAC (Building Resources Across Communities) NGO. This involved establishing ‘play labs’ as spaces for children to play. Yeshim explains the difficulty of conducting a conventional survey in a community largely unfamiliar with the concept of sociological ‘research’, with generally low literacy levels, and a very conservative culture where women mostly follow the practice of ‘purdah’.

Most of the refugees arrived in Cox’s Bazaar from Myanmar by foot, with nothing but what they could carry. They initially had little support, and cleared space for themselves by cutting down trees on the forested hillsides of the border region. Today, just a few years later, the camps have already attained a relatively settled, permanent appearance. Rather than conforming to the stereotypical image of a cramped and dirty ‘refugee camp’, the camps (although very congested) have a relatively orderly feel, with spots of beauty.

The Bangladeshi government has been keen to keep the refugees at arms length, and does not want to allow them to attend regular Bangladeshi schools. Whatever education is available is therefore provided within the camps themselves. Rather than regular ‘schools’, this has tended to involve establishment of ‘learning centres’ - child-friendly spaces where children could learn through play.

discussion with the researchers. So, the BRAC programme was designed in close consultation with fathers. It was delivered by men (not women), who undertook one-to-one discussions with fathers. The initial results, Yeshim says, have been encouraging.

Although the lead researchers of the TIES project are mostly based in New York, it was conducted throughout in close collaboration with local authorities and researchers in Bangladesh, as well as with the refugee community in Cox’s Bazaar.

Related readings:

In this, the third of our three episodes on education and ethnocultural diversity in Thailand, we talk to Chawin Pongpajon of Chulalongkorn University, who is also a PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of Education. Chawin’s doctoral project is entitled Education for assimilation or social transformation? Investigating school education for peace and social justice in the conflict-affected southern Thailand.

Gairan and Ed begin by asking Chawin to explain how he came to study this topic, and to explain some of the challenges related to peace and social justice in southern Thailand. He responds by offering a brief overview of the history of this region, whose people are predominantly Islamic and Malay-speaking. He explains how these southern provinces became incorporated into the kingdom of Thailand, and how, during the 20th century, the rise of Thai nationalism and processes of modern state formation created strains in relations between local communities and the country’s Buddhist, Thai-speaking majority.

After a period of relative quiescence during the late 20th century, Chawin tells us how conflict flared up again in the early 2000s. This has been attributed in part to the influence of Islamist educational activities in the region, which revived or expanded following changes to local security arrangements under the first administration of Thaksin Shinawatra.

Chawin’s doctoral research examines the role that education has played in official attempts to counter the insurgency and address local discontent. He has also visited schools in southern Thailand - both state-run, public schools and informal, Islamic schools - to understand the role that different types of schools play in shaping identities and influencing inter-communal relations.

We ask Chawin to comment on how the role of education in providing ‘skills’ or ‘qualifications’ is promoting greater integration (or assimilation) of the Malay-speaking Muslim population of southern Thailand, or whether it is exacerbating or fuelling alienation. We further discuss whether ‘multicultural education’ means the same thing when we are talking about the educational challenges of conflict-affected Muslim Malay regions of southern Thailand, and refugee or tribal communities in the country’s north and west. In one recent conference paper, Chawin has referred to ‘education for peace and multiculturalism’ in basic education in southern Thailand as an ‘illusion’. Here he explains what he means by describing multicultural education as ‘illusory’ in this context.

Related readings:

Continuing our discussions of education and the challenges of ethnocultural diversity in Thailand, in this episode we talk to Omsin Jatuporn, who is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Social Science Education, at Chiang Mai University.

Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, is central to a region that is culturally, linguistically and ethnically highly diverse. Whereas, in the previous episode, we discussed educational issues relating to cross-border migrants settling in Thailand, in this episode we focus on challenges relating to communities that are ‘indigenous’ or long-settled in the hill country of Thailand’s north.

Omsin speaks both as a researcher and on the basis of his experience as a former schoolteacher. That grounding in classroom experience marks him out from many of his colleagues in teacher training. Omsin discusses the difficulty of introducing ‘critical’ theoretical perspectives into teacher training programmes in Thailand. He relates this partly to the political and professional context in which teacher educators must work, but also raises the issue of the ‘commodification’ of cultural diversity.

This ‘commodification’ of culture is especially apparent in northern Thailand, where the visible or material cultures of ‘tribal’ communities have been exploited for the promotion of tourism. However, the marketisation or exoticisation of ‘minority’ cultures often implies a rather shallow engagement with the experience of these communities themselves and the meanings attached to their cultural practices.

Omsin also discusses the way in which schooling for the minorities of northern Thailand relates to efforts to promote a discourse of shared ‘Thai-ness’. This is also an issue for education in southern Thailand (discussed in Episode 3), but whereas amongst Muslims in the south, the treatment of cultural diversity is often viewed through the lens of ‘conflict resolution’, in the north the potential for commodification and commercialisation of culture for tourism promotion tends to predominate.

In his scholarship, Omsin has drawn upon ideas of ‘coloniality’ and ‘decolonisation’. But in the case of Thailand, what does it mean to talk about ‘colonialism’? If it makes sense to see forces of ‘colonialism’ at work in Thai education, who are the colonisers? Omsin, Gairan and Ed also discuss problems arising from sweeping generalisations about ‘the global South’. They reflect on how certain trends or slogans in education policymaking surface in various national contexts, and what this means for questions of power or agency.

Since Omsin has also written comparatively about ‘multicultural education’ in South Korea and Singapore, we ask him why a comparison with these societies seemed interesting or relevant from a Thai perspective.

Finally, Omsin discusses how the internationalisation of higher education has progressed in the Chiang Mai region, and how the region’s ethnic character is related to its attractiveness to certain groups of international students.

Related readings:

In recent years, Thailand has experienced a wave of migration from neighbouring countries, particularly of workers seeking relatively low-paid, low-skilled jobs. This has added a new element to the ethnocultural and linguistic diversity that has always been a feature of Thai society - though one that has often been obscured in official discourse.

Migrant workers and their families face wide-ranging challenges, not least in gaining access to education for their children. However, Thailand still lacks official policies or guidelines regarding the education of these children. Against the backdrop of insecure employment, pressures for social and cultural assimilation are exacerbated by the language barrier. This is manifested vividly in classrooms and schools. With an intensification in nationalism characterising both political discourse and much of popular culture, migrants face considerable pressure to conform to a monolithic vision of ‘Thai-ness’. This context makes the interpretation of multicultural education in Thailand an issue of significant interest and importance.

In this episode, Dr Thithimadee Arphattananon, an associate professor in the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia (RILCA) at Mahidol University, Thailand, talks to Edward Vickers and Gairan Pamei about her research on education in Thailand, specifically in relation to the treatment of cultural diversity. Dr Arphattananon earned her PhD from the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she has also worked with Thailand’s Ministry of Education. She has close to two decades of experience working as a scholar and professor of education in Thailand.

Themes covered in this conversation include:

• Multicultural education discourse, its origins and diverse interpretations in different national and cultural contexts

• The unique landscape of multicultural education in Thailand

• The specific educational and cultural challenges encountered by children and families of migrant workers in Thailand

• The politics and practice of language-in-education for children of migrant workers

• A project led by Dr Arpahttananon on multicultural education for 5th and 6th graders in Thailand

Related readings:

(See below for a selection of images from David’s article, related to the discussion in this episode.)

In this final episode of our series on The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery (linked to the special issue of Comparative Education), Edward Vickers talks to David Tobin of Sheffield University. David has researched and published extensively on the politics of contemporary Xinjiang and the situation of the Uyghurs. In his article for the special issue, he focuses on the use of visual imagery by the Chinese state, Uyghur communities and other actors to project or disseminate particular messages concerning Uyghurs.

David begins by explaining how he came to be interested in the Uyghurs and Xinjiang. The conversation quickly turns to the ways in which Uyghurs have been largely overlooked or ignored in mainstream discussion of China. In his writing, he describes Chinese policy - including education policy - towards the Uyghurs as ‘racist’, ‘colonial’ and ‘genocidal’, and here he explains the use of these terms.

In his article, David is also harshly critical of tendencies in the field of Chinese Studies in the West, which he sees as to some extent complicit in the CCP’s racism towards the Uyghurs. Elaborating on this point, he argues that the essence of this complicity is ‘silence’. It is impossible properly to understand contemporary China without taking account of the treatment of domestic ‘others’ or ‘minorities’, including the Uyghurs. In so far as Western-based scholars talk (or teach) about China without taking full account of the significance of these ‘minorities’ and their relationship with the state, such scholars convey a distorted - and implicitly racist - picture. The reasons for this neglect are various - ranging from self-interest (jobs, money, access for fieldwork) to a misplaced sense amongst those who are less historically aware that China, as a past ‘victim’ of Western colonialism and imperialism, somehow cannot also be a perpetrator of colonial oppression.

Explaining his focus in the Comparative Education article on visual imagery, David reflects on the power of images, as compared with text or numbers, to affect public consciousness and shape debate. The CCP’s propaganda techniques bear witness to its awareness of the power of imagery. Propagandistic portrayals of the Uyghurs and other ‘minorities’ have long depicted them as backward, exoticised, and often eroticised recipients of benefits bestowed by the Chinese state, as it leads them towards the sunlit uplands of ‘modernisation’. But David notes how depictions of the Uyghurs in the early 21st century have taken a darker turn, as the party-state has sought to portray them as agents of violence and chaos, threatening public order and security.

Ed and David further discuss whether, when it comes to portrayals of Muslim Uyghurs as a ‘terrorist’ threat, we can detect the influence of Western rhetorical and visual tropes associated with the ‘War on Terror’. David acknowledges that there has been some borrowing in terms of language and slogans, but is sceptical as to how far this betokens any deeper influence on attitudes and policy towards the Uyghurs. He sees the CCP’s use of language and imagery borrowed from the West’s ‘War on Terror’ as related mainly to attempts to influence Western public opinion and to ‘normalise’ the Chinese state’s repression of the Uyghurs in Western eyes.

David concludes his article by discussing ways in which members of the Uyghur diaspora have sought to deploy visual imagery to push back against the narrative of the Chinese party-state and assert their own experiences and identities. He reflects on how effective such efforts been so far, and discusses several examples - including a discussion with Uyghur exiles over the most appropriate choice of cover image for the recent edited volume, The Xinjiang Emergency. David makes several suggestions regarding the role that China scholars should play in assisting members of the Uyghur diaspora to gain voice, respect and recognition.

David Tobin is a Lecturer in East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield and author of Securing China’s Northwest Frontier: Identity and Insecurity in Xinjiang (Cambridge University Press). David completed a PhD in Politics at the University of Manchester (2013) following intensive Mandarin language training at Peking University and Xinjiang University. He has lectured in Politics and East Asian Studies at the University of Manchester, University of Glasgow, and the University of Nottingham-Ningbo.

Suggested readings:

Following on from the previous episode, in which we discussed the ROC’s Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission, in this episode of the Asian Education Podcast we discuss language education in Taiwan and its relationship with the island’s fraught identity politics. Haruna Kasai, a doctoral student at Kyushu University, is currently researching language education policy and practice in contemporary Taiwan. Of particular interest to her is the relationship between ‘multiculturalism’ and Taiwan’s language education, and this is the subject of her article for the special issue of Comparative Education on ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’.

Haruna’s interest in language education and its relationship to identity arises partly out of her own multilingual upbringing, which saw her spend much of her childhood (and receive most of her schooling) in the USA. The interview begins with a brief discussion of how language, culture and identity are seen as related in the Japanese context. This comparative perspective relates not just to Haruna’s personal experience, but is also relevant historically given the enduring influence of Japan and Japanese colonialism on Taiwanese society and the island’s education system.

A particular focus of Haruna’s research has been the introduction over the past decade of programmes for teaching Southeast Asian languages in Taiwan’s schools. These are languages associated with immigrants from Southeast Asia - mostly women who have come to Taiwan as brides of Taiwanese men. We discuss some of the social, cultural (and gender-related) issues and challenges associated with this wave of immigration.

The discussion then moves on to the reasons behind the introduction of Southeast Asian languages into the school curriculum. From the 1990s, ideas of Taiwan as a ‘multicultural’ society have become increasingly popular, especially amongst advocates of Taiwanese independence - for whom invoking the island’s cultural diversity is a means of diluting or resisting claims for Taiwan’s monocultural ‘Chineseness’. At first, however, notions of Taiwanese multiculturalism were associated with diversity amongst Taiwan’s long-established ‘native’ population: Hoklo (Minnanese), Hakka and the Austronesian indigenous peoples. It is only within the last decade or so that Southeast Asian immigrants have come to be incorporated into public representations of a multicultural Taiwan.

Ed and Haruna also spend some time discussing the wider politics of language education in contemporary Taiwan, especially in relation to the place of English in the school curriculum. The place of English in the curriculum, and the way in which the language is portrayed in textbooks and more widely, reflect assumptions about the status of particular languages and their place in an implicit cultural-linguistic hierarchy. These assumptions reflect themes that emerge from Alessandra Ferrer’s analysis in her article for this special issue of ‘internal orientalism’ on Taiwan (and the case of the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission). The relationship between language education, identity politics and ideas of cultural or civilisational hierarchy are further examined in a forthcoming article jointly authored by Alessandra and Haruna.

Reading:

In this episode of our series on ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’, we discuss a little-known entity perhaps only peripherally related to education, but central to the shifting politics of identity in contemporary Taiwan: the ‘Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission’ (蒙藏委員會) (MTAC).

In her doctoral research, Alessandra Ferrer examined the changing role of the MTAC following the retreat of the Republic of China (ROC) to Taiwan in 1949. During the period of Martial Law under the KMT, the Commission’s function was primarily propagandistic, its very existence serving to remind ROC citizens and the wider world of the claims of ‘Free China’ to sovereignty over the entirety of Chinese territory, with ‘China’ defined as encompassing both Tibet and the whole of Mongolian (including that of the independent Mongolian People’s Republic).

In this interview, we begin by reviewing the origins and purpose of the MTAC on the Chinese mainland, when the MTAC was tasked with both with asserting China’s claims to governance over Tibet and Mongolia and, as far as possible, extending and embedding actual Chinese influence in these regions. Alessandra also explains how the Commission’s origins can be traced to the Qing Dynasty agency for ‘managing barbarians’, the Li Fan Yuan (理藩院).

Following defeat in the Chinese Civil War of the late 1940s, the KMT retreated to Taiwan, but continued to assert its rightful authority over the Chinese mainland, including Tibet and Mongolia. This meant maintaining all the institutions of the Republican regime, including the MTAC.

In her article for the Comparative Education special issue, Alessandra analyses the treatment of Tibetans and their religion in MTAC literature, and characterises MTAC discourse as an instance of ‘internal orientalism’. In effect, she is drawing a comparison between ROC discourse on the ‘frontier’ regions of Tibet and Mongolia and Western colonial ‘civilising missions’. One key point that emerges from her work relates to the dominance of assumptions of Han cultural or civilisational superiority vis-à-vis Tibet during the Martial Law era. At the same time, ROC officials were keen to highlight instances of CCP brutality and insensitivity in its treatment of ‘minorities’ on the mainland, and to contrast this with the enlightened and beneficent policies proposed by the MTAC.

However, MTAC discourse on Tibet underwent some significant changes during the 1980s and 1990s, as Taiwan itself democratised and the KMT’s Chinese nationalism was increasingly challenged. On the one hand, Taiwanese nationalism drew upon a narrative of a ‘multicultural’ Taiwan that rejected the established emphasis on the island’s monolithic ‘Chineseness’. But at the same time, underlying ideas of what constitutes ‘a nation’, and assumptions of Han Chinese cultural superiority, have remained relatively strong.

Alessandra also comments on how the rapid democratisation of Taiwan from the late 1980s, and the growing challenge to Chinese nationalism, was viewed with apparent alarm by MTAC officials at the time. MTAC literature suggests that officials within the Commission increasingly found themselves more in sympathy with their counterparts on the Communist mainland than with ‘nativist’ opinion on Taiwan itself. This is reflected in a fractious relationship between the MTAC and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile during this period, with some MTAC publications during the 1990s blaming the Dalai Lama for irresponsibly stoking ‘anti-Han sentiment’ among Tibetans. When the Dalai Lama was scheduling a visit to Taiwan in the late 1990s, his aides insisted that the MTAC be excluded from any role in hosting him.

Unsurprisingly, independence-leaning Taiwanese politicians had little interest in maintaining the MTAC. However, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration of President Chen Shui-Bian (2000-2008) was unable to abolish the Commission, because it lacked a majority in the Legislative Yuan (or ROC parliament), which was still dominated by the KMT. It was only after the DPP’s comprehensive victory in the 2016 elections for the presidency and legislature that abolition became possible - and was duly in enacted in 2017.

Readings:

In this episode, recorded in December 2023, Ed talks to Queenie Lam of Trier University (Germany) and Y-Europe about the issue of academic freedom in China, specifically as it relates to Hong Kong. Dr. Lam grew up in Hong Kong, but has family roots in mainland China (Fujian) and South East Asia (the Philippines and Indonesia). She worked from 2010 until 2022 at the Academic Cooperation Association in Brussels, having previously worked at various academic and administrative units of The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Our conversation ranges across various problems and issues affecting academic freedom both within China and beyond. We discuss Hong Kong’s National Security Law of 2020 (NSL) and its educational implications, reflecting on how dramatic the consequent changes in Hong Kong’s educational climate have been. After some discussion of the implications for schooling - based on our own experience teaching and studying in Hong Kong - we focus especially on the implications of the ‘securitisation’ of education for teaching and research in universities. Drawing on contributions to an October 2023 workshop at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, we discuss what the NSL has meant for academia in Hong Kong, touching on the case of Rowena He (He Xiaoqing), a researcher on contemporary Chinese politics who lost her job at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the autumn of 2023, and ending with some discussion of freedom of speech issues in other countries affected by the extraterritoriality of Hong Kong’s NSL.

Although our main focus is on Hong Kong, we also discuss challenges to academic freedom in the field of China Studies in the West. We reflect on some of the pressures faced by China scholars today (whether they are Chinese nationals or foreigners), and some of the factors that may account for persistent failure by many to acknowledge the severity of the situation facing scholars and educators in Hong Kong, let alone the Chinese mainland.

Suggested Readings:

Continuing our series on ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’, featuring authors of articles in the related special issue of Comparative Education, in this episode Edward Vickers interviews James Leibold and Tendor Dorjee, co-authors of an article on boarding schools for Tibetan students in contemporary China.

We begin by discussing the origins on the boarding school program for Tibetans, which originated in the 1980s and was at first aimed at a relatively narrow elite. From the beginning, alumni of these ‘inland’ schools reported experiencing significant cultural and linguistic loss, and confusion in terms of their own identities. But for some, at least in these early years, this schooling became a route to relatively high-status and lucrative employment.

In their special issue article, James and Tendor argue that the past decade or so has seen an intensification of efforts to use education to enforce the assimilation of minority nationalities in China. In discussing the origins and implications of this shift, we note that it has happened in the context of a wider ramping up of the standardisation of education across China, in an attempt to universalise a homogenous, totalising model of urban (male) Han modernity. It is important to remember that this has been directed not only at non-Han ‘minorities’, but also at rural Chinese (both Han and non-Han) in general. But with respect to non-Han communities, especially those in western regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang, this programme of cultural homogenisation assumes a particular edge.

We note that, until the early 2000s, there were alternate educational options available at least to some Tibetans - of travelling to exiled Tibetan communities in India to study in boarding institutions there, or attendance in private or monastic schools inside of Tibet. But since 2006, that route to India has been closed off, just as the enrolment of Tibetans into Chinese boarding schools has been expanded and non-state schools were shuttered across the Tibetan plateau.

That shift has coincided with a gradual shift from the relative cultural openness of the 1980s and 1990s in China towards the brutally assimilatory emphasis of current policy, allied to an expanding and ever more sophisticated apparatus of monitoring and surveillance. As James explains, the CCP has always sought to use education as a tool of ideological and political control, but in the eyes of the leadership, several key events have appeared to raise the stakes, including: the Student Movement of 1989; the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; the Tibet and Xinjiang unrest of 2008 and 2009; and the advent of Xi Jinping’s ‘New Era’ after 2012. Although the CCP has always maintained assimilation as the ultimate goal of its ethnic policy, the perceived urgency of that goal, and the strategies seen as necessary to its fulfilment, have significantly altered over the past two decades as the CCP adopted a more interventionalist approach to state-society governance.

As we discuss, part of this shift is attributable to a declining faith in the power of economic growth to drive assimilation, by persuading ‘minorities’ of the benefits to be gained by ever-closer union with the Han. That loss of faith in (neoliberal) economics has coincided with the declining allure of the West as an economic (and possibly political) model, since the global financial crisis of 2008-9. This is the context in which the regime has shifted to a far more forceful approach to assimilation through education.

A concept central to this assimilatory programme is the Zhonghua minzu. In their article, James and Tendor write of how the concept of the 'Zhonghua minzu', or the Chinese 'race-nation' as they gloss it, has been interpreted in increasingly homogenous and totalising terms as it has assumed greater prominence in CCP propaganda in recent years. Increasingly under Xi Jinping, the ‘nation-race’ encompassed by the Zhonghua minzu has come to be defined in singular rather than plural terms. James observes how officials and scholars in China (e.g. Prof. Ma Rong of Peking University) have proposed the use of the term zuqun (‘ethnicity’) in place of minzu (‘nationality’) to refer to ‘minorities’. For this reason, some scholars writing about China’s ‘minorities’ consciously use the term ‘nationalities’ as a form of resistance to the CCP’s assimilatory drive.

Alongside this terminological and ideological shift, even tokenistic and perfunctory references to cultural diversity have been fading from the school curriculum. This has been happening in a gradual and subtle way, so that most Han Chinese do not appreciate the shift. But as James and Tendor show in their article, the implications for the curricular status of ‘minority’ languages and cultures have been drastic and far-reaching. 'Bilingual education’, for example, is still - notionally, at least - official policy for the schooling of China's 'minorities'. But in practice bilingual education has become effectively monolingual and monocultural for ‘minority’ students. And boarding schools offer an especially powerful tool for ‘cultural erasure’, since they provide an environment allowing for almost total control of every aspect of students’ lives.

In the title of their article, Tendor and James describe boarding schools for Tibetans as 'colonial-style' institutions. The branding of Chinese policy towards minorities as 'colonial' remains controversial for many, but for James and Tendor the colonial agenda animating educational policies and institutions directed at Tibetans seems clear. There is the drive by a metropolitan centre to assert control over a distant and culturally distinct periphery, accompanied by an explicit civilising mission. Although many scholars today are analysing Chinese minorities policy through an explicitly ‘colonial’ lens, this is a relatively recent development, for reasons that James discusses. And it has not yet significantly penetrated the field of Educational Studies.

Readings:

The special issue of Comparative Education on ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’ (issue 60.1, 2024) features an article by Tianlong Yu and Zhenzhou Zhao on ‘Confucianism in Multicultural China’. In this episode of the Asian Education Podcast, Edward

Ed and Tianlong begin by discussing the meaning of the term ‘Confucianism’. While they note the diversity of interpretations of this school of thought - both in the past and present - they highlight several key features, namely an emphasis on self-cultivation; the importance of social and political order; the observance of propriety in one’s personal relationships (seen as essential to maintaining order); hierarchy; and patriarchy.

They then reflect on the reasons for the revival of interest in Confucianism on the Chinese mainland since a low point for the sage’s reputation in the 1970s, when the Cultural Revolution witnessed a campaign to ‘Criticise Lin Biao and Confucius’. Tianlong argues that renewed popular interest in Confucianism during the 1980s and 1990s can be explained largely as a reaction to the anxieties and disorientation experienced by many ordinary people during a period of rapid social and cultural change. But he distinguishes this popular movement from the attempts by the Communist Party (CCP) to deploy Confucianism in attempts to shore up its authority, especially after the unrest of 1989 and subsequent collapse of the Soviet bloc. The CCP’s embrace of Confucianism has been highly selective, as it has co-opted a highly selective, conservative-authoritarian interpretation of Confucian thought.

It is this version of Confucianism that, under Xi Jinping, has been folded into the notion of ‘outstanding traditional Chinese culture’. As China’s economy has stuttered and the CCP’s ability to invoke performance legitimacy has consequently waned, a conservative, authoritarian and monolithic vision of ‘Chineseness’ has become increasingly central to the regime’s ideological narrative. At the same time, however, the scope for popular debate over Confucianism or for non-state Confucian activism has significantly narrowed.

In their article, Tianlong and Zhenzhou analyse the treatment of Confucian ideas in school textbooks, showing how these promote a largely Han-centric vision of ‘Chineseness’ and portray Confucianism as central to a historical civilising mission directed at non-Han groups around China’s periphery. As other articles in the special issue also argue (e.g. Yan and Vickers 2023; Bulag 2023), textbook narratives assume a teleology of assimilation, with non-Han people’s inevitably drawn to adopt or conform to the ‘superior’ culture of the Han, with Confucianism at its core.

Tianlong and Zhenzhou sought to investigate the reception of such messages by students from ‘minority’ backgrounds - both from non-Han minzu (or ‘minority nationalities’) and from religious communities. Amongst these informants, they found significant resistance to curricular messages. Although the Party sees Confucianism as useful for establishing a moral and cultural hierarchy that legitimises the social and political status quo, young Chinese from 'minority' backgrounds do not seem to find this messaging particularly convincing or persuasive. This suggests that the CCP's embrace of a conservative, authoritarian brand of Confucianism may actually be counterproductive in terms of the Party's own aims.

The research on which this article is based was conducted in around 2016-2017, just as the government was preparing to strengthen central control over the more politically sensitive school subjects (Chinese language, history, morals, politics), and issue new textbooks. The intervening years have also seen a significant intensification of assimilatory pressure on ‘minority’ groups in China - as other articles in this special issue discuss (e.g. Leibold and Dorjee 2023; Yan and Vickers 2023; Bulag 2023; Tobin 2024). The climate in China today makes the task of updating the research for this article difficult if not impossible, but were it feasible to talk to a similar group of students again, it is hard to imagine them delivering a more positive verdict on the CCP’s educational campaign to foster shared consciousness of a monolithic, homogenous ‘Chineseness’.

Tianlong Yu is Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA. His research focuses primarily on issues of identity, voice, representation, access, power and their relationships to schooling. He researches and writes on moral, citizenship, and multicultural education in both American and Chinese contexts.

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