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A teacher at Haiyin Early Education, a guoxue private school, has been accused by students’ parents of adopting corporal punishment as a method of discipline
National Studies
Rough Road Ahead
The comeback of traditional Chinese studies has stirred up controversies because of a lack of regulations and resources. In a modern context, reviving classical Chinese culture is easier said than done By Wang Yan
T
he Chinese government has been focusing on economic development for decades. As the country’s GDP rocketed and the gap between the rich and poor spread ever-wider, Chinese people began to chase wealth in a way they hadn’t been able to for generations. But as China’s dive into materialism deepened, people started to feel a kind of spiritual crisis and loss of identity. As globalization and commercialization engulfed their lives, many sensed true “Chinese-ness” fading away. Today, young parents struggle to seek methods to help their children establish a sense of cultural identity, which many think cannot be achieved through a public education system that is heavily influenced by internationalization. China’s modern education system is largely
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a copy of the West’s. The problem, according to some educators, is that in the West, a rounded education generally consists of efforts from both schools and religious organizations. Schools impart knowledge, while moral education tends to depend on families and, potentially, their religious beliefs. “In China, there is a lack of religious groups to shoulder the responsibility of cultivating people’s morality,” said Gong Hongyuan, cofounder of traditional Chinese school Boya Shuyuan. “Thus there is an urgent need to recapture shuyuan [academy of classical learning] culture, which can spread the Confucius spirit.” At the same time, as China has come to be the second-largest economy in the world, the State has pinpointed cultural soft power as an element that is key for domestic stability and
international acceptance. One official top initiative was a resolution to develop and promote “China’s cultural system” both at home and abroad. Abroad, China has escalated efforts to establish Confucius Institutes around the world since 2004, and domestically, a wave of an apparent obsession with guoxue, or the study of traditional Chinese philosophy, literature and art that mainly centers around Confucianism, has been sweeping the nation for nearly a decade. Lured by potential profits to be gleaned from the expanding market, guoxue education, like many things in China, is expanding too rapidly for regulations and resources to catch up.
Facing Challenges
Despite the fact that there is a commonly accepted concept for guoxue in some acaNEWSCHINA I September 2015