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Modernizing education with Chinese characteristics? The Chinese academic discourse on education modernization (1985–2021)

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Abstract

Academic work in China has proliferated in response to the persistent and recently intensified policy interest in education modernization, which, however, has received little scholarly attention. This paper explores the Chinese academic discourse on education modernization from 1985 to 2021. Three main patterns have emerged from the literature: (1) localizing Western modernization theory; (2) innovating a “new Chinese culture” through synthesizing the Chinese and Western merits; and (3) interpreting the “Chinese road” to education modernization. By comparison with the historical intellectual discourse, this paper illustrates that a unilinear notion of time, a dichotomous view of “China–West,” and deeply rooted nationalism have conjointly characterized the contemporary academic discourse, enabling Chinese scholars to envision the progress of education and justify what policymakers desire in education. Thus, the current construction of education modernization with Chinese characteristics has been continuously underpinned by the Western modernist framework, while imagining education inspired by Chinese cultural resources has been restricted.

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Notes

  1. The former Premier Zhou Enlai first proposed “Four Modernizations” in 1964, namely, industry modernization, agriculture modernization, national defense modernization, and science and technology modernization.

  2. CNKI is a pivotal national research and information publishing institution in China, which launched its online database in 1999 and became the largest resource system of academic periodical publications in Chinese.

  3. To be clear, “academic discourse” and “intellectual discourse” are distinguished in this paper; we intend to explore the “academic discourse” through reviewing academic articles, which can be seen as part of a broader “intellectual discourse”.

  4. Many articles were excluded in this step because they merely took “education modernization” as a backdrop to other issues discussed.

  5. “Suzhi” can be awkwardly translated into “human quality”.

  6. As we shall illustrate later, a similar intellectual reflection on Western modernity by Chinese education scholars has emerged much later.

  7. As Hayhoe (2007, p. 283) notes, a “progression” can be observed in Gu’s work “from educational ideas rooted in the European and Soviet experience, in the early 1980s, to an increasing awareness of the importance of China’s cultural traditions”.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Chen Donglin, Wu Longhai, and Yao Hui for their great assistance in the initial stage of article reviewing and selecting, and thank Jeremy Rappleye, Keita Takayama and anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on the earlier drafts of this paper. Any omissions or errors are our responsibility alone.

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities under Grant 2020ECNU-GXJC004, and the Key Project Funds for Key Research Base of Humanities and Social Sciences, Chinese Ministry of Education, under Grant 22JJD880019.

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  1. Department of Education & Institute of Schooling Reform and Development, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Yun You

  2. Faculty of Education, Guangxi Normal University & Institute of Education Modernization, Guangxi Institute of Basic Education, Guilin, China

    **aowei Yang

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You, Y., Yang, X. Modernizing education with Chinese characteristics? The Chinese academic discourse on education modernization (1985–2021). Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-023-09853-1

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