The Chinese government has shifted the pattern of rural schooling over the past decade, replacing village schools with urban boarding schools. The stated goal is to improve school quality, while deploying resources more effectively. However, the new boarding schools fail to provide a safe, healthy environment or protect and enable students' human rights. This article explores questions of how and why a boarding school policy supposedly intended to narrow the urban-rural educational gap has, in fact, achieved the opposite result, extending social injustice. Adopting a public choice perspective, the article analyses the roles of different stakeholders in the policy arena, including the policy initiator (the central government), the policy implementer (the local government) and policy consumers (children and society). The findings suggest that policy consumers are passive participants in interactions between various governmental bodies and society. Children's interests are ignored and their rights overlooked in educational policy formulation and enactment.
This paper examines the representation of ethnic minorities in China through a review of campus newspapers, a major print medium in which universities exercise power over the discourse of cultural recognition. Three universities attended by minority students were selected. A two-dimensional mode (content and configuration) is established to analyze ethnic representations. A combination of content analysis and discourse analysis is used to categorize and analyze text and photographs relevant to ethnicity. The study concludes that (1) different discursive practices are employed to construct 'images' of ethnic groups as 'Others' or 'Us'; (2) representations of ethnic minorities and the Han generate three discursive dichotomies between minority and majority: minority groups are distinctive, potentially separatistic, and visible; and the Han people are normative, patriotic, and invisible, respectively; (3) the university media reflects an ideology of 'state multiculturalism' that constructs a reflexive representation of the relationship between majority and minority.
The global flow of citizenship education in China has spurred much discussion in Chinese academic circles. This study explores the interaction between citizenship education and China's the existing political-ideological education and moral education as a space is negotiated a space in the current "ideoscape." A qualitative approach is adopted to synthesize the literature coming from China on citizenship education from an interpretive and critical perspective. The research findings suggest: (a) The territory of orthodox political-ideological education is being narrowed down as its relationship with citizenship education is configured; (b) citizenship education and moral education are represented using different images to delineate their distinctions; and (c) the introduction of "global citizenship education" includes many new topics and competencies that expands the current ideoscape. This study argues that the ongoing debates on citizenship education are deeply rooted in China's structural transformation, in which society tends to be separated from state. In negotiating its own territory, citizenship education reshapes China's ideoscape in the education field. The paper concludes by suggesting that citizenship education should make a unique contribution to facilitating young citizens in a reexamination of the values imbedded in political-ideological education and moral education with a new social consensus being reached through the communication of ideas.
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