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Final Research Paper - Kaiwei He
Final Research Paper - Kaiwei He
12.17
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INTRODUCTION
era of reform and opening-up began. The reform and opening-up policy has bought
China rapid economic development and modernization construction. Not until 1987
did the Chinese economy begin to surge in growth, averaging a GDP increase of 10%
over the past 30 years. During this period, the Chinese economy roughly expanded by
48 times its original level (“Economic Structure of China”, Economywatch). With the
achievement that its scale and nurturing capacity enlarged a lot. Especially, there has
been a leap on Chinese higher education since 1999. According to statistics, the
colleges came up to 5,460,500 in 2006, five times that in 1998 (1,083,600); and the
number of universities in 2006 was 1,867, three times that in 1978 (598) (Zhang,
provided qualified talents for the country with its diversified and multidisciplinary
layout, promoting national progress in all fields within the recent 20 years.
Chinese people have got in touch with more and more exotic ideology from the West.
democracy has become the most influential and most controversial topic at present.
From the perspective of public opinion, there is a reason why the demand of
promote anything it wants to promote and control everything it needs to control for
organizations and independent labor unions; and maintains Party control over all
judicial institutions (“The World Report 2015: China”, Human Rights Watch). People
must follow the command of the government or relevant institutions; once someone
defies it, he or she will be punished. People who don’t love the party and the
regulate and control the words and actions of the people; any move detrimental to the
party and the government will be seen as the destruction of social stability and
maintains strict controls over what can be seen on the Internet and social media; this
education and democracy in the Chinese context has attracted many scholars'
education connects democracy. For the contentious idea, China in the 21st century has
been a major test case but only a few empirical studies were applied to investigate. In
the 2015 paper “College education and attitudes toward democracy in China: an
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empirical study”, three Chinese scholars, Gang Wang, Liyun Wu, and Rongbin Han,
found the positive relationship between education and democracy. People who have a
college or higher degree show a stronger desire for democracy and support various
However, an extraordinary finding emerged from the study, indicating that different
knowledge-based elites. Even if all of them are well-educated in college, people who
are business owners will be reluctant to support democracy; people who become CCP
members will not prefer democracy any more. So, the treatment of democracy, in
other word, the dependence on regime, is driven by outside interests for different
Actually, based on the already existed inference that higher education and
democracy are highly correlated, Andrys Onsman and Jakie Cameron studied
Western-style education as a part of current Chinese education about the role it plays
student mobility (Onsman, Cameron. 2014. 6). Findings revealed that Chinese student
will not be more desirable for democratization under a Western-style education, even
under any style of higher education, because of national pride and patriotism. Also,
with the restrictive structure of the institution and the increasingly improvement of
people’s living standard, Chinese students are not more likely to pursue democracy
(12).
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At the end of the Onsman and Cameron's study, they said that much more work
“Reviving the Past for the Future?: The (In)compatibility between Confucianism and
stated that Confucian democracy and modern democracy are fundamentally different.
He extracted the term of Minben, which means that the people are foremost, from
Confucianism to argue his point (Duan, 2014, 147). Although some scholars thought
Minben is similar with the concept of modern democracy, Duan insisted that they are
very different because there is a gap between ancient China and modern China and
that those scholars ignored that fact (152). Of course, incompatibility is not
personal ethics (154, 156), . In Duan’s opinion, after fitting with the modern world by
some alternation, Confucianism will be very useful to rebuild the civil society of
China, that is the way how “Confucian democracy” would make sense. Through
especially with political power, may hinder the development of democracy in China, a
Except for the content of education and some cultural factors, the experiences
in Chinese school with special institution also play a role in shaping the attitudes of
Democracy in the Chinese Classroom”, Jiacheng Li and Jing Chen consulted John
within and without the classroom (Li, Chen. 2013. 94-95). So they stated that the
classroom community is a new and important place to develop democracy. They used
responsible for both teaching and caring for students; and found out that students’
relationships with banzhuren and their activities, namely, the interaction between
individuals and community will affect people’s attitude towards democracy and could
To sum up, the educational content and form, cultural factors, school system
and so forth are related to and have more or less influenced the process of perceiving
whether how long an individual has been immersed in such a circumstance affects his
or her quest for democracy; or, whether the length of that time can reflect the height
of one’ educational level. Then I would like to raise a more specific hypothesis: In a
comparison of individual Chinese, those who have higher educational level will be
METHODOLOGY
use the data from the World Values Survey of China in 2012, which is about the
values and attitudes held by Chinese citizens form a political cultural perspective.
First, I run a cross-tabulation analysis, with the highest educational level that Chinese
for observing and analyzing more directly. After that, because the sampling method
was simple random sampling and there are two categorical variables from a single
whether there is a significant association between the two variables. I state the null
RESULT
Chi-Square Tests
Asymptotic
Significance (2-
Value df sided)
Pearson Chi-Square 63.414a 36 .003
Likelihood Ratio 64.279 36 .003
Linear-by-Linear Association 12.214 1 .000
N of Valid Cases 2064
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The result of Chi-Square Test shows that the P-value (0.003) is less than the
significance level (0.05), so I reject the null hypothesis. Thus, I conclude that there is
DISCUSSION
have demonstrated that educational level can affect people’ attitude towards
democracy through data. For now, what education bring to Chinese people is the
facial change of cognition, and the desire and quest for democracy. However, whether
education can make democracy an ideology, rebuild people' social habits and promote
People who have higher educational level are more rational in political
participation and pay more attention to the practical effects, compared to people with
lower educational level. Most of western countries adopt democratic regimes. Well-
educated people have stronger political efficacy and are more likely to regard political
Whereas in China, people usually think of political participation as a form with a lack
severe than that of people with lower educational level, rendering the development of
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democracy stagnated.
Moreover, people who have high educational level will take in more and be
influenced more by domestic traditional culture. In the aspect of cultural tradition, the
East and the West hold extremely different attitudes towards political participation.
political participation as a sacred duty of citizens. While in China, the tradition that
well-educated people should enter politics was a desire rather than a responsibility.
The traditional ideal of Chinese scholars did not advocate political participation.
More importantly, the educational content and form affect people's political
without education and people with high or low educational level definitely behave
contains much democratic ideology, people with high educational level naturally have
more democratic awareness. But eastern education emphasizes more on loyalty and
education generates more divergent thinking and critical spirit. These differences
democracy which brought equal rights and wealthy lives to western countries. It may
good. Thus, in the matters of helping Chinese people truly understand what
democracy is, why democracy and how to achieve democracy, there is still a long way
WORKS CITED
Duan, Demin. “Reviving the Past for the Future? The (In)compatibility between
<http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=5e14ed3a-
4cff-4319-baaa-ac18aaf05bc8%40sessionmgr4002&hid=4105>
<http://www.economywatch.com/world_economy/china/structure-of-
economy.html>
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< inased.org/v9n3/ijpev9n3.pdf>
<http://www.eric.ed.gov/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?
accno=EJ1047081 >
“The World Report 2015: China.” Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch, 9 Jan.
<https://www.hrw.org/asia/china-and-tibet>
<http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12564-015-9386-5/fulltext.html>