Abstract
Is Confucianism compatible with citizenship? If yes, how? Cultural transformation in recent citizenship studies provides a theoretical junction to bring the two concepts together. In terms of cultural citizenship, this paper explores the making of Confucian cultural citizens by analyzing students’ discourses in a Chinese Confucian classical school. It reveals (1) the process of moral self-transformation, whereby the individualities are embedded into ethical relations by the extensive readings of classical literature; (2) practically discursive contradictions between individualism and authoritarianism that is based on the notion of a cultural hierarchy; and (3) the institutional predicament in striving for the recognition of cultural citizenship by the state and society. Finally, it concludes that the dilemmas in discourses and status are part of the contradictions in the overall Chinese party-state’s management of individualization.
Highlights
Since Engin Isin [7, 13] raised the issue of ‘citizenship after orientalism’, the study of citizenship in the cosmopolitan academic community has made conscious efforts to cast off the tendencies of essentializing citizenship as an Euro-American framework that generalizes the experiences of other non-Western states or societies, and has reflexively turned to a local perspective in order to investigate the ‘roots’ of specific citizenship regimes in light of the local conditions of political systems, social structures and cultural recourses
I will discuss Confucian cultural citizenship, a term that could be defined as a process to reflexively reconstruct one’s conduct and ethical relations according to Confucian values in discursive and actual practices by drawing upon socio-symbolic boundaries
In cultivating students into a new version of Confucian cultural citizens, the discourses of individuality have contributed on the one side to these students disentangling their relationship with the ‘immoral’ state-maintained systematic schools and on the other side to their consciousness of their cultural right to choose the ‘morally good’ classical education
Summary
Since Engin Isin [7, 13] raised the issue of ‘citizenship after orientalism’, the study of citizenship in the cosmopolitan academic community has made conscious efforts to cast off the tendencies of essentializing citizenship as an Euro-American framework that generalizes the experiences of other non-Western states or societies, and has reflexively turned to a local perspective in order to investigate the ‘roots’ of specific citizenship regimes in light of the local conditions of political systems, social structures and cultural recourses. From the abovementioned perspective of cultural sociology, I regard cultural citizenship in this paper as a process of socio-symbolic practices to reflexively interpret one’s social, cultural and political conditions by creating symbolic and social boundaries [18]1 and constructively act to generate an identity or position and a reflexive understanding of it. I will discuss Confucian cultural citizenship, a term that could be defined as a process to reflexively reconstruct one’s conduct and ethical relations according to Confucian values in discursive and actual practices by drawing upon socio-symbolic boundaries. The exploration of cultural citizenship is accomplished by revealing the processes through which the classical school students are reflexively ‘being made’ and ‘(self) making’ [23] (new) identities (positions), mainly through the symbolic and social space of classical education. The final remarks, I discuss the institutional predicament that Confucian students face on the basis of summarizing the conclusions derived from the previous parts
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