The School Curriculum in China Today: A Study of Economic, Political, and Social Influences

Abstract

This study considers the way in which the Chinese government’s core socialist values are being recontextualised into the most recent educational reforms in China. Education is identified as the key setting for symbolic recontextualisation where these values are transmitted and reproduced through an assemblage of discursive curriculum policies and pedagogic practices. Through analysis of curriculum policies, and observations and interviews with teachers, the research reveals a sociocultural orientation to the knowledge utilised for the teaching of the values within the area of Chinese language education at the senior school stage in China. I theorise this orientation as socioculturalism. The research also demonstrates how three strands of culture – traditional Chinese culture, revolutionary culture, and advanced socialist culture – have contributed to the emergence of this curriculum trend towards socioculturalism. The emphasis on sociocultural knowledge helps to recontextualise the core socialist values into the curriculum policies and practices. This process contributes to the cultivation of an idealised type of knower, one who personifies these values, and who can become a qualified builder of, and worthy successor to the country’s great socialist cause. Three key sociological concepts, Durkheim’s collective representations, Althusser’s ideology, and Bernstein’s recontextualisation, contribute to the identification and theorisation of the political and curriculum phenomena of recontextualisation which I investigate. Drawing on these three concepts, I theorise the socioculturalism shown in the three empirical investigations of curriculum policy and practice as the means to recontextualise the government’s core socialist values into the education system so as to develop what I term socialist collective representations. The political purpose is to use these socialist collective representations to resist a modern social trend towards individualistic and materialistic values, seen all-pervasively in the country’s economic, ecological, political, cultural, social, and educational spheres. This rise of individualism and materialism is the result of the country’s market economy reforms since the 1970s. These reforms have had the potential to undermine the government’s earlier socialist collective representations. By invoking the core socialist values and incorporating them at the doxic level of collective representations, the government aims to revitalise its ruling ideology of market socialism in the contemporary economic period of corporate globalisation.