China's peopleship education: Conceptual issues and policy analysis

This article proposes the concept of peopleship education, embodied by an analysis of four major Chinese educational policy documents since the 1990s. The Chinese 'people', different from 'citizens', are abstract, correct and materialistic. Such 'people' are produced by peopleship education, understood as state hegemony through public education to create Chinese individuals who leave the legitimacy of the Communist Party of China (CPC) unquestioned. Situated within a framework of state hegemony that consists of political socialization and depoliticization, China's peopleship education is underlined by two distinct features, i.e., historical representation and materialistic modernization. The former refers to a historical conditioning and translating of people's abstractness and correctness, via which the CPC claims its legitimacy in representing the people and the society. The latter refers to a subtle shift of power from the realm of party-state legitimacy to a limited field of modernization as economic productivity - a shift that produces a materialistic people whose interests are to be justified by economic answers rather than political ones. Implications are further discussed, regarding policy analysis in China and comparative citizenship studies.