ABSTRACT

This chapter examines how a television documentary, Legal Report (Jinri shuofa), served as a top-down form of citizenship education that sought to strengthen the legitimacy and power of the state by presenting people at the margins of Chinese society as examples of how the rights and responsibilities of citizenship should and should not work. Unlike other chapters in this volume which consider citizenship education activities aimed at social groups at the margins of Chinese society, such as the farmer education campaigns described by Rachel Murphy and the pedagogy for the urban poor described by Tianshu Pan, this chapter examines citizenship education that targets a mainstream Chinese audience of over 900 million. Aware of their huge reach, the producers of Legal Report felt a tremendous responsibility to use the programme content to make Chinese society more advanced and sophisticated by inculcating in the audience an understanding of modern legal knowledge and a legalistic outlook. Most particularly, the documentary producers sought to affect a shift from a public mindset that saw justice in terms of traditional morality to one which recognized the importance of law in everyday life. But in trying to change public consciousness, the documentary makers were forced to confront the tension that existed between traditional and modern ideas about the rights and responsibilities of Chinese citizenship. The chapter addresses the role of the documentary Legal Report by looking at its background, case studies, narrative structure, and conceptualizations of Chinese citizenship.