Education and political socialisation in contemporary China: From institutional discourse to teaching materials

This chapter centres on the People’s Republic of China (PRC), exploring the relationship between education and political socialisation from a discursive perspective. It explores how the interconnections between education, politics and the Party-State ideology are manifested and circulated in contemporary China through different instantiations of the official discourse of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on the subject. This study is guided by two interrelated research questions: (1) How is the relationship between education, politics and the Party-State ideology framed in the official discourse of the Xi Jinping Era, as represented from the selected sources? (2) What are the keywords and fixed formulations of the official discourse on education, which recur through different texts, genres and domains of this discourse? What kind of discursive frames do these activate?
To address these questions, the contribution first analyses the discourse constructed by a corpus of texts meant to encapsulate Xi Jinping’s vision on education between 2012 and 2022; second, the educational dimension is considered, with examples provided from a textbook designed to teach the leader’s thought to children.