ABSTRACT

Chapter 6 sheds light on the role of Chinese higher education in China’s national image-building project. It shows how Chinese universities have managed to tackle the state’s image problem in contemporary China by reusing and reinterpreting aspects of China’s historical legacy once denounced by the socialist state. With reference to the CPC’s vision of Confucian ethnics and citizenship education, this chapter shows how the state uses its political power in the present to shape how people interpret China’s past and conceptualise its future. The CPC’s technique of reusing history to legitimise itself is an example of the political control of history – as George Orwell (1949, p. 313) said, ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past’. China’s moral education curriculum still serves to compel citizens’ acceptance of the ruler as a moral leader.