ABSTRACT

This chapter begins by reviewing recent shifts in the Chinese Communist Party’s vision for China’s development, and the role of education within this. The urgency of constructing popular patriotic sentiment has been energetically advocated by Chinese statesmen from the Nationalist revolutionary Sun Yatsen onwards. It was Sun who famously referred to his compatriots as ‘a loose sheet of sand’, a perception shared by contemporary foreign observers, including Thorstein Veblen. During the early-and mid-1990s, campaigns of patriotic or guoqing education were conducted on university campuses, in the People’s Liberation Army, and in government work units. The drive for patriotic education has complemented a focus in education policy more broadly on the demands of modernisation and economic development. Patriotic education, meanwhile, seeks to reinforce the message that while raising the quality of the people is essential for the strength of the state, a strong, modern and united Chinese state is the supreme embodiment of the aspirations of all the people.