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Many scholars note that since the early 1990s, the CCP has been invoking Chinese nationalism to rescue the party's declining ideological legitimacy. Probing China's political indoctrination (thought work), this article makes two contributions to such conventional consensus. First, empirically it argues that the rise of nationalism in the 1990s was not altogether new. Instead, from the early 1980s, the CCP had been switching to "patriotism." Second, this article argues that the communist regime's transition to nationalism was hesitant. It was an interactive process whereby multiple layers of the society and elite, confused alike, worked together to explore whether and how to embrace nationalism. The nation‐building also bore the imprint of the revolutionary and state‐socialist past. This article suggests that though the nation‐state has become the dominant political format of the world, as a pattern it fuses with a society's traditions, preconditions, and internal struggles. Such fusions made nation‐building in the non‐Western world unseparated from quasi‐national legacies such as revolution and socialism and could yield consequences other than capitalism and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic development fails to greatly increase demand for liberal democracy in China. Is China an exception to modernization theory? If so, why? This paper studies these questions by analysing five waves of Asian Barometer Survey data from 2002 to 2019. We have three major findings. First, the shift of political values exhibits an inverted U-shaped curve with the mid-2010s as its turning point. Second, the better educated and more media exposed turned conservative much faster than the rest after the mid-2010s. Third, to trace the mechanism of this unusual reversal and divergence, we resort to a Difference-In-Differences model, taking political indoctrination, measured by media exposure and education, as treatment and the post-2013 era as treatment time, finding that political indoctrination significantly explains political cultural backsliding. Our findings enrich modernization theory by identifying the "interceptive" power of the state between economic development and cultural shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberal studies (LS) textbooks used in Hong Kong public secondary schools have incurred controversy regarding perceived biased contents; however, what appears uncertain are what techniques the textbooks used to incite hostility towards the mainland of China and encourage students to participate in violent acts in Hong Kong. The present study used Michel Foucault's order of discourse theory, particularly the "division and rejection" framework regarding the power of discourse to analyze five popular LS textbooks. The findings reveal that the textbooks depict a division between the fabricated irrational image of the mainland and the rational image of Hong Kong. Specifically, the textbooks paint Chinese patriotism as irrational while encouraging the student readers to reject their Chinese identity. The textbooks also create a division between altruistic and capable civilians and passive, silent ones, with the morality of the former being connected to violence and radicalism. In this way, the textbooks produce a discourse of hostility towards the mainland and the people in the mainland while encouraging violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and how does state indoctrination work? Building upon research on motivated reasoning and family socialization, I argue that only those individuals whose parents have connections to political patronage are subject to state indoctrination because their pro-regime biases transmitted from parents induce higher receptivity prior to government messages. Focusing on political education in China, I conduct a quasi-experimental analysis exploiting the sharp variation in textbook content generated by China's most recent curriculum reform. Results based on a national survey show that the new politics textbooks successfully affected only those individuals whose parents had worked for the government. The finding survives extensive robustness checks and falsification tests. I also consider several alternative explanations of the effects: preference falsification, selective attention, parental indoctrination, and educational quality. This paper not only highlights the role of intergenerational transmission in moderating the effectiveness of state indoctrination but also casts doubt on the actual degree to which regimes can change minds by changing educational content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares and re-examines citizenship education (CE) teaching and learning in Hong Kong (HK) and Guangzhou (GZ), China. It questions two stereotypical perceptions—that China schools indoctrinate students, and that CE lessons in HK are more open than those in mainland China. Data are drawn from some 30 lesson observations, 1,200 questionnaires, and 80 teacher/student interviews from six sampled HK and GZ schools. The study used NVivo to examine qualitative data, and employed hierarchical linear modelling with the help of SPSS and AMOS to analyse quantitative data. The findings suggest both cities are similar in terms of teaching/learning CE, due to globalization and domestic changes, and have similar CE conditions more conducive to open pedagogies (e.g., inquiry-based approaches) than indoctrination. HK's greater socioeconomic openness does not ensure its CE is more open than GZ's, for pedagogical and non-pedagogical reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our country, so far the civil morality education seems to be more inclined to indoctrinate people with "we should follow the moral conventions" than to enable them to understand "why we should do so". The reflexive value of civil morality is the rational thinking of "why we should follow moral conventions", and it is a basic problem that civil morality education has to resolve. A person who can generate moral influence on society must be a happy and responsible man, who also needs support and protection of reflexive value. Therefore, the school moral education should highlight the reflexive value of civil morality, which can strengthen the inherent attractiveness of civil morality and the spiritual guidance of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines early Chinese moral education—its curriculum, objectives and the philosophical assumptions underlying them—in its classical Confucian expression. It analyzes early Confucian debates on moral psychology, the Confucian moral curriculum consisting of model emulation, cultural practices and canonical instruction, and the methods and aims of Confucian statecraft. The study reveals how ancient Confucians integrated these components into a coherent discourse on moral education and its implementation for the related purposes of cultivating virtuous people and benevolent rulers. It explains why different early Confucians argued that ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ must interrelate suitably not only for people to develop morally and prosper collectively, but also to moderate the ruler’s power by subjecting it to alternative sources of authority. This examination demonstrates that, contrary to modern criticisms of traditional Confucian culture and unlike contemporary uses of moral education in China, classical Confucian moral education was understood to serve aims quite different from either bolstering an autocracy or political indoctrination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis on the issues of national identity, citizenship, and belonging by investigating the national education debate in Hong Kong, China. It discusses the association between pro-Beijing organisations, educational institutions, and the government. It explains the activism against red indoctrination, which is a rare collaboration between various forces against national education.

This issue is a collection of twelve documents on the policies in Xinjiang. These policies can be grouped into four categories: economic inducements, ideological indoctrination, cultural assimilation, and social control. Economic inducements are provided on the assumption that economic growth will benefit the ethnic minorities. Satisfied materially, their tendency to resist is weakened. Ideological indoctrination has the power to cultivate political identification with the regime of China through an official narrative of historical view and the contribution of the regime to the economic and social development of Xinjiang. Cultural assimilation is to integrate Uighurs culturally with the Han-dominated Chinese culture through education. Social control is to establish a coercive system for preventing subversion and punishing the secessionists in order to weaken the will to resist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideological indoctrination is explicit and pervasive in China, with the school curriculum used to mould the spirit and character of adolescents, fulfilling ideological and political purposes. But the exact content varies over time. Comparing two versions of textbooks published in 1997 and 2005, this paper depicts the continuities and change in the curricular discourses centred on the notion of 'good citizen'. While keeping the official status of socialism and the Party leadership untouched, the new textbooks soften the presentation and packaging of the ideological content, very much in tandem with the soft authoritarianism practised since the post-Deng era when China has been deeply involved in the processes of marketisation, liberalisation and globalisation. The new textbooks also adopt a stance of greater reconciliation with human rights and global citizenship. While being granted more autonomy and rights, young citizens are still expected to shoulder the mission of national revival and socialist modernisation-very much derived from official policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the evolution of the curriculum of the Central Party School (CPS) in Beijing, China between 1982 and 2001. Particular attention is paid to how the CPS has experienced increased secularization through a reduction in social exclusiveness among cadre-trainees, ideological diversity in the CPS curriculum, and an emphasis on social engagement to address social problems. Curriculum research indicates that the CPS is infused with the values and political culture of the elites in the central Communist Party, while cultivating "high-quality leading cadres" to address the challenges of increasing globalization. A period of "regularization" at the CPS during the early 1980s is examined. A review of the principle classes and courses offered at the school is presented.

This paper discusses the Chinese indoctrination methods for prisoners of war (POW). In the wars of the last 50 to 100 years, American soldiers who fell into enemy hands experienced a variety of physical and emotional hardships, but the Chinese have made the first major attempt to produce defectors and collaborators among American POWs and to indoctrinate them in an alien political ideology. The article does not propose to consider the Chinese aims in conducting this enterprise, nor does it discuss in any detail how the indoctrination program affected men. Instead, this paper will present a brief account of the specific experiences of the POWs from the time they were captured until the time they were repatriated. To some extent, it will be possible to present a chronological account. It should be pointed out, however, that most of the significant experiences were occurring contemporaneously. Therefore, it has been chosen to organize them into some social psychological categories rather than simply to recount them as they occurred.

The article presents empirical studies of what actually happened to people who were "brain-washed." The author describes the process of "thought reform" which Chinese intellectuals have to undergo as part of the price of belonging to the new regime. This description provides an excellent example of the intensity with which the Chinese are pursuing their program to indoctrinate as many segments of their population as possible. It is a subject, which has received much attention in this country when involving such groups as American prisoners of war and other incarcerated Westerners. But there has been surprisingly little systematic psychological investigation of the thought reform procedures that the Chinese have employed with their own people, particularly with their intellectuals. The most intensive of these all-Chinese thought reform programs for intellectuals is that conducted in the "revolutionary colleges"--set up all over China immediately after the Communist takeover. These were particularly active between 1948 and 1952, when they represented an ideological hard core for the entire thought reform movement, an extreme model for reform efforts throughout the population.

Our study examined the respective relationships between two components of higher education in mainland China—science education and political indoctrination—and the religiosity of university students. Using a cross-sectional, representative sample of about 1700 college students in Beijing, we found first that students studying natural/applied sciences were less likely to perceive Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam as plausible and less likely to have supernatural belief, relative to students in humanities/social sciences. In addition, the more students positively evaluated the political education courses—which indicates students' acceptance of political indoctrination—the less likely they reported Protestantism and Catholicism as being plausible. Nevertheless, neither science education nor political indoctrination was associated with the perceived plausibility of Buddhism and Daoism or the worshipping behavior of students. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of the secularization debate and the research on education, religion, and state atheism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]