The Chinese Dream: Educating the Future

An Educational Philosophy and Theory Chinese Educational Philosophy Reader, Volume VII

Michael A. Peters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367349844
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000596762
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This edited collection is based on a series of articles written by Michael A Peters as Editor-in-Chief of Educational Philosophy and Theory to explore the concept of The Chinese Dream first introduced by President Xi in 2012. This seventh volume in the Editor's Choice series provides a philosophical and historical analysis of The Chinese Dream by analyzing its major intersecting narratives - liberal, Confucian and Marxist. With chapters covering higher education strategy, social governance, socialist rule of law, the US-China trade war, technological unemployment and the emergence of the Chinese techno-state, this volume also offers an introduction to Chinese philosophy and history, and its narrative re-crafting that presents China as a global power. The author calls this process and the emerging Chinese narratives 'Educating the Future'.

Part 1
The Chinese Dream

Chapter 1
Introduction

From national humiliation to world power

China is a remarkable country. In the space of a couple of generations it has condensed the stages of world economic history in moving from an agricultural peasant economy, through an established industrial economy, to a new service-oriented knowledge economy that leads 5G mobile network technologies. In the same period, China’s population, now 1.4 billion, has shifted from being rural-based to one now distributed in the large mega-cities and mega-regions of Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Chongqing, with some fifteen cities in excess of fifteen million people. The Chinese are a remarkable people: the Han group makes up more than 90 percent of the population; the Hui or Chinese Muslims, the Zhuang, the Manchu, Uyghurs and Miao are the five largest ethnic groups, each with some ten million; and the Yi, Tujia, Tibetans and Mongols are approaching some ten million. In addition, the People’s Republic of China recognises fifty-six different ethnic groups. The term Zhōngguó zhī rén (the Chinese people) was used in the Qing dynasty to refer to all people. Zhōnghuá Mínzú (the Chinese people) is a concept that refers to all Chinese irrespective of ethnicity. Chinese culture is remarkable as one of the world’s oldest cultures and earliest ancient civilisations. It is the dominant culture in East Asia, along with Japan, its modern enemy and now partner, Korea – North and South, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and Mongolia, a region of 1.7 billion people that is in part bound together by the Chinese cultural sphere and derivations of the Chinese script. With almost a quarter of the world’s total population, it represents one of the most dynamic, rapidly growing and productive areas of the global economy that also exhibits a special cultural or anthropological sensitivity and acceptance of the new digital technologies of robotics, AI, deep learning and 5G mobile networks. China has overtaken Japan as the world’s second-largest economy and on the current trajectory will out outstrip the US within a decade. Within Asia it has an important economic and diplomatic role to play, although its growth rate may in time be surpassed by India and Indonesia. Vietnam, Myanmar, Bhutan, India, Laos, Cambodia and Bangladesh are among the world’s fastest growing economies, matched only by some countries in Africa (Ivory Coast, Tanzania, Senegal) and Iraq. On the world stage, China and Japan compose roughly the same proportion of the world economy as the US and the EU, with the US currently edging them out but altogether comprising roughly 70 percent of the world economy. These figures are indicative of the shift in world economic activity and world politics. The purchasing power of the 400 million Chinese middle class is more than equal to that of the US and Europe combined.

It hasn’t always been the case. China’s emergence as a world power is recent and also evolving quickly. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, yi dai yi lu) is indicative of this new spreading economic and cultural power and refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road with the aim of promoting economic cooperation among countries along these routes. It is a form of market integration based on promoting the flow of capital, goods and services between Asia and the rest of the world and facilitating cross-border investments and supply chain cooperation. It also includes policy coordination for large infrastructural development projects and enhanced financial cooperation as well as cultural exchange.

Figure 1.1 The Belt and Road Initiative

Source: www.worldbank.org/en/topic/regional-integration/brief/belt-and-road-initiative

The scale is impressive. As the World Bank (2018) reports:

The initiative aims to strengthen infrastructure, trade, and investment links between China and some 65 other countries that account collectively for over 30 percent of global GDP, 62 percent of population, and 75 percent of known energy reserves.

In early 2019, Italy was the first European country to sign up to the BRI. Some critics have referred to the BRI as the Chinese Marshall Plan and see in it a scheme to rival the liberal international order. It is estimated to cost over $1 trillion, and China has already invested $210bn while Chinese companies have secured more than $340bn in construction contracts. The April summit in 2019 was attended by over forty heads of state.¹

This is highly symbolic of China’s status as a world power, but this has not always been the case. In fact, the Chinese refer to the 100 years between the 1840s and 1940s as the ‘Century of National Humiliation’ (百年国耻) beginning in the Qing Dynasty with the First Opium War and a series of imperialist wars and interventions by Western nations and Japan, that saw China forced to concede territories. Narratives of ‘national humiliation’ have played an instrumental role in constructing modern Chinese identity. Boyang Li (2014) describes ‘humiliation narratives’ in terms of three periods: ‘the origins and evolution of “national humiliation” in the pre-1949 era, the absence of “national humiliation” from the 1950s to the 1980s, and the reinvention of “national humiliation” in the post-1989 era’ (p. 2).

Boyang argues that Japan plays an important role in both victim and non-victim narratives. These narratives disappeared during Mao’s era from 1950 to the 1980s only to emerge thereafter with Japan serving as the indispensable ‘Other’ in the construction of Chinese identity. The revival of victim discourse since the late 1980s took place with the advancement of the Patriotic Education Campaign.

After the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping started the economic reform in China… The CCP had faced the most severe political challenge – ‘three belief crises’ – since 1949. This ‘ideology vacuum’ gave rise to appearance of western liberal values among Chinese young people in the late 1980, and then led to the well-known anti-government demonstration in Tiananmen Square. After controversial suppression of the student demonstration, Deng began to reflect on his previous strategy. He concluded that the biggest mistake of the Party was that they ignored the importance of ideological education.

(Li, 2014, p. 45)

Soon after 1989, the Patriotic Education Campaign was launch by the CCP that focused on ‘the humiliating experience that China has suffered in the fight against the West and Japanese invasion’ (p. 46). The discourse of ‘Century of National Humiliation’ was revived to overcome the perceived regime crisis. This involved a form of political education that focused on the promotion of Chinese history and culture with flag-waving ceremonies and other unification rituals, including the production of new history textbooks that could be used at all education levels. This has been an ongoing revision that emphasised Japan as the brutal foreign invader and also the centrality of the Nanjing Massacre. Textbooks were supported by films along with the memorisation of over 100 sacred sites that celebrated the remembrance of conflicts with foreign invaders. Humiliation narratives have been ‘increasingly embedded in governmental organisations, popular culture, and public media’ (p. 52). Of course, national histories always are a double-edged sword that tell the story of the glory of the nation, celebrate heroes and picture the nation against the invader. While the use of history is an important means of narrative consolidation and national identity especially since the rise of the nation-state, it can emphasise a historical documentation that provides an accurate account of the past, on the one hand, and be used for political purposes to mobilise national sentiments in favour of certain policies, on the other. There is no doubt the narratives of national humiliation in which Japan plays the role of imperial aggressor has given away in the current climate, especially in the age of the Belt and Road narrative, to a view of Japan as economic partner and joint wealth creator. Together, China and Japan comprise an economic aggregation and region that is unsurpassed in the global economy. The BRI may be the spur that reignites the Japanese economy through massive investment in infrastructure projects.

Education plays a critical part in this narrativisation process, not only retelling the stories of the nation and thus providing the ideological backing for current directions but also providing the opportunity to develop a tradition of modern historiography that entertains a welter of different accounts that can serve the breeding ground for national narrative variations that capture the alternative paths to Chinese modernity. Only a pluralist historical account that explores alternatives including traditional Confucian, Marxist, liberal and CCP perspectives will allow for the necessary historical complexity of China’s past. There is no doubt that the Chinese narrative under President Xi has shifted the ontological possibilities with an accent on Chinese modernity, global diplomacy and world economic leadership defining the next period leading up to 2035 when, given current projections, China will be the largest economy in the world. In this period, education at all levels will play a special role not only in providing the right mix of technological skills but also in terms of ideological support in helping to imagine and construct in the Chinese mind the future of China as a world power. I call this process ‘the education of the future’. In moving forward, not in a linear line but in a spiral historical concept that speaks to past greatness now within the family of nations, China faces considerable challenges: the challenge of the disappearance of labour as AI is applied to enterprise and Industry 4.0 kicks in; the challenge of greening China and the cultivation of ecological values and of green industries of the future; and the challenge of education in an increasingly mobile and technological society that is interconnected with every corner of the globe. I use the term ‘education of the future’ as a way of pointing to these challenges that have to be managed at scale in a country four times larger than the US, the world’s largest democracy. With an increasingly well-educated population, China has to deal with problems of choice and freedom no longer simply understood at the market level but also at the political level, and it must be wary of the systematic attempts by other nations to picture its ambitions in false, distorted and malicious ways. In short, it must also educate the world about China not only to respect real power but also to engage and collaborate with others, a source of pragmatic and philosophical intercultural adjustment.

Note

1 http://beltandroad.hktdc.com/en and www.beltandroadsummit.hk/en/index.html.

References

Li, B. (2014). Chinese narratives of “national humiliation” and Japan’s role in the construction of China’s national identity, 1915 to the early 2000s. A Thesis Submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of International Relations in International Relations. Retrieved from http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/handle/10063/3419.

World Bank. (2018). The belt and road initiative. Retrieved from https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/regional-integration/brief/belt-and-road-initiative.

Chapter 2
The path to Chinese modernity

Philosophical and historical narratives of the Chinese Dream

Introduction: the rise of China

‘The rise of China’ is a narrative that has existed in different forms for many years, with both positive and negative characterizations. It is a shifting and incomplete narrative that has a number of internal dimensions, including the deliberative crafting of a Chinese economic, cultural and diplomatic mission in terms of the ‘Chinese Dream’. President Xi introduced the concept in 2012. It was seen as a means of coordinating economic, cultural and military strategy in terms of intermediate and long-term planning cycles of the CCP annual Congresses. Within China, there are various competing versions of the Chinese Dream and its functions apart from Xi’s official interpretation that include, at least, liberal, Confucian and socialist strands that turn on the question of a viable politics in China that informs a concept of Chinese civilization. As one group of Chinese academic intellectuals express the point: ‘When China eventually beats the West at the West’s own game, becoming the world’s dominant superpower, what will remain of “China” and “Chinese civilization”?’¹ This group of Chinese intellectuals associated with East China University divide up the stakes of the Dream as a contest of ideas among competing ideological factions:

The ‘liberals’ who had dominated discussions in the 1980s now split into competing groups. Some argued that that market reform would not only enliven the economy, but would also wear away the vestiges of China’s feudal (and Maoist) autocracy, both at political and social levels. Other liberals worried that market forces were creating a new crony capitalism that enriched the state and the capitalist bosses at the expense of the people. Similar concerns gave rise to the ‘New Left’, a group of non-liberal intellectuals dedicated to the renewal of socialism through a creative rereading of socialist – and Maoist – traditions, combined with an embrace of Western post-modernism and critical theory. On the right, a group of culturally conservative intellectuals known as the New Confucians denounced both the liberals and the New Left, insisting that China’s tradition, properly reinvented, provided all the resources China needed to find a stable path toward future development. These groups engaged in ferocious debates throughout the 1990s, debates which continue today.

In their joint ‘mission statement’ they indicate that the political conception the ‘China Dream’ is not an empty political concept but rather designed to challenge the American Dream, which only recently has been given an aggressive ‘Make America Great Again’ reading by Donald Trump set on curtailing China’s economic growth through ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• PART 1 The Chinese Dream
• PART 2 The American Dream
• PART 3 The emergent Chinese techno-state
• PART 4 Future challenges
• Postscript: educating the future
• Index