'Observation' as China's Civic Education Pedagogy and Governance: An Historical Perspective and a Dialogue with Michel Foucault

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14

Foreign Countries; Confucianism; Educational Philosophy; Governance; Citizenship Education; Educational History; Cross Cultural Studies; Political Influences; Cultural Influences; Social Change; Social Systems; Propaganda; Western Civilization; Discourse Analysis; Hermeneutics; Social Class; Self Concept; Social Values

10.1080/01596306.2017.1404444

0159-6306

This paper examines China's civic education discourses from a historical and cross-cultural perspective. It unpacks "observation" as a political--cultural--spatial pedagogy, underpinning Confucius' educational envisioning, Mao's domination in the Cultural Revolution Movement, and Xi's "China/ese Dream" propaganda. Drawing upon Foucault's provocation of the Western "gaze," this paper historicizes Confucius, Mao, and Xi's discourses to explicate a Chinese "observation" diagram. With Confucius, observation works as an onto-hermeneutic principle, grounding China's cosmology and sovereign-subject governance. With Mao, "observation" becomes a panoramic domination-surveillance mechanism, which, coupled with a Confucian punitive shame, empowers the proletarian mass in excluding-purging the bourgeois as class enemies. With Xi, "observation" turns into a symbolic governing technology of self, subjecting its citizenry to re-branded Confucian values toward realizing a participatory China/ese Dream. In so doing, this paper shows the parallels and contradistinctions between the Chinese "observation" and the Western gaze in historically and structurally ordering knowledge production and social-educational governance.

As Provided

2019

EJ1233008