This study is designed as preliminary research into the relationship between developing global citizenship and studying abroad by investigating the perceptions of Chinese students who studied in a UK university in 2006. Through the lens of Oxfam's perspective of global citizenship,
findings that are based on questionnaires and in-depth interviews show that Chinese students have a particular understanding of global citizenship and do not commonly accept the global citizen identity. Studying abroad is deemed to have a positive effect on the development of some elements
of global citizenship but a comprehensive sense of global citizenship seems not to be developed explicitly as a result of studying abroad.
The literature widely reports that national citizenship remains the focus of citizenship education in Japan and China, despite the emerged global elements in both cases. Yet the literature stops short of exploring how to advance the agenda of global citizenship in the dominant national citizenship education under the centralized education systems in Japan and China. With a list of global citizen attributes derived from a particular conception of citizenship, this article identifies and compares the pedagogical capacity and potential for global citizenship education in relevant Japanese and Chinese national curriculum guidelines, many of which have been recently revised. It is found that many attributes are indeed supported in the Japanese and Chinese guidelines, which, furthermore, leave pedagogical potential for the development of unsupported others. The findings at the policy level bear practical and research implications for global citizenship education in Japanese and Chinese schools.
Against the contemporary background of international and national commitments to citizenship education for social justice, this paper examines and compares the subject, aim and extent of social justice in citizenship education behind official rhetorics in Japan and China. It develops a three-dimensional framework of social justice to analyse, through mixed methods of text analysis, a set of selected authoritative documents, including official policies, national curriculum guidelines and government-authorized textbooks. The results reveal discursive divergences and convergences between the Japanese and Chinese cases. Social justice in the Japanese discourse tends to be constructed as recognitive injustice eliminable through identical treatment towards one another by individuals. By contrast, social justice in the Chinese discourse tends to be constructed as distributive justice achievable through differential treatment by the party-state. Common to the two cases is that both pay scant attention to collective actions for and the global bearing of social justice. The paper argues that the two cases similarly stop short of promoting comprehensive, transformative and global social justice education.
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