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Final Research Paper-First Draft

Educational Level and The Importance of Democracy in China

Fall 2015 Research Methods

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INTRODUCTION

China’s College Entrance Examination resumed in 1978, a year in which the

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

economic and social development, Chinese education also obtained a remarkable

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

number of students enrolled in ordinary universities, institutes, colleges, and junior

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,

2011, 371). A well-developed education system of China incessantly cultivated and

provided qualified talents for the country with its diversified and multidisciplinary

layout, promoting national progress in all fields within the recent 20 years.

Additionally, economic basis determine superstructure. Since the reform era,

Chinese people have got in touch with more and more exotic ideology from the West.

As maintaining stability by government became a hot topic for Chinese people,

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

democracy grows in current Chinese society.

China is an authoritarian one-party state. The government has absolute power to

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promote anything it wants to promote and control everything it needs to control for

itself. It restrains expression, assembly and associations; forbids human rights

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

government will be considered unpatriotic, as a sin. State establishes departments to

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

harmony. In terms of the limitation of freedom of speech, the Chinese government

maintains strict controls over what can be seen on the Internet and social media; this

firewall extends to Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube etc..

Since, seemingly, the demand of democracy by Chinese people followed the

boom in Chinese education, especially in higher education, the relationship between

education and democracy in the Chinese context has attracted many scholars'

attention. Previous researchers have studied that relationship from different

perspectives but have not yet come to consensus.

In modernization theory, which prevailed in U.S in the 1960s and 1970s,

development of education is a key to achieving modernization; and there is an

argument that democratization follows modernization. Therefore, it presumes that

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

political participation of citizens should occupy a more important position in China.

However, an extraordinary finding emerged from the study, indicating that different

views on political development between entrepreneurial elites, political elites, and

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

structures of Chinese citizens (Wang, Wu, Han. 2015).

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

in promoting democracy in the 2014 paper “Democracy and international higher

education in China”. They conducted a study in the University of Nottingham Ningbo

China, which provides an utterly British education and encourages international

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

in the area involving Confucianism needs to be done because focusing on social

harmony which is over democracy, as national policy, is derived by reference to

Confucianism as a very important traditional characteristic of Chinese nation (12). In

“Reviving the Past for the Future?: The (In)compatibility between Confucianism and

Democracy in Contemporary China”, written by Demin Duan in 2014, the author

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

synonymous with irrelevance, so Confucianism can be of great help to modern

democracy work in China, as long as it is disconnected from political power, being a

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

Duan’s paper, it is reasonable to presume that using Confucianism inappropriately,

especially with political power, may hinder the development of democracy in China, a

situation that education could hardly change.

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

people towards democracy. In the 2013 paper “Banzhuren and Classrooming:

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Democracy in the Chinese Classroom”, Jiacheng Li and Jing Chen consulted John

Dewey’s theory about what democracy is to understand the relationship between

Chinese classroom and democracy; and concluded that democracy is everywhere,

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

data analysis to study Chinese “banzhuren”, a very particular teacher who is

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

be a new direction of Chinese democracy to make the society better (104-105).

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

and discovering democracy of Chinese society. Therefore, I propose a question here:

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

more likely to think it is important to live in a country that is governed democratically

than will those who have lower educational level.

METHODOLOGY

To analyze the relationship between education and the attitude of Chinese

people to democracy, especially how different educational levels affect Chinese

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people to think about the importance of living in a democratically governed country, I

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

individual attained as independent variable and the importance of living in a country

that is governed democratically as dependent variable. It includes column percentages

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

population, I applied Chi-Square Test in my cross-tabulation analysis to determine

whether there is a significant association between the two variables. I state the null

hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis:

Ho: There is no relationship between educational level and the

importance of living in a country that is governed democratically.

Ha: There is a relationship between educational level and the

importance of living in a country that is governed democratically.

For this analysis, I establish the level of the significance is 0.05.

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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a. 19 cells (38.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum

expected count is .27.

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

a statistically significant association between educational level and the importance of

living in a country that is governed democratically in China.

DISCUSSION

It seems that the relationship between education and democracy, especially we

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

the democratization of political participation still needs further studies.

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

participation as a citizen' responsibility, and people with that responsibility participate

more actively in politics. They tend to maintain democracy as a basic principle.

Whereas in China, people usually think of political participation as a form with a lack

of political efficacy. The situation of not participating in politics of them is more

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.

Western culture is strongly influenced by Ancient Greece democratic culture, viewing

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

participation by modeling cognition, attitude and way of thinking. People with or

without education and people with high or low educational level definitely behave

differently in political participation. In western countries, since their education

contains much democratic ideology, people with high educational level naturally have

more democratic awareness. But eastern education emphasizes more on loyalty and

obedience. Western education lays emphasis on discovery and cultivating abilities,

while eastern education lays emphasis on teaching knowledge. In contrast, western

education generates more divergent thinking and critical spirit. These differences

reflect on the actions: one is participating in politics positively to achieve democracy

and one is passively waiting for the achievement of democracy.

Education make people aspire to the future. Based on the information

globalization arose from technological development, Chinese people start to accept

democracy which brought equal rights and wealthy lives to western countries. It may

lead to a misunderstanding that just being governed democratically is enough and

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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

to go for Chinese education.

WORKS CITED

Duan, Demin. “Reviving the Past for the Future? The (In)compatibility between

Confucianism and Democracy in Contemporary China”. Asian Philosophy,

24(2), 147-157. 11 p. MAY 2014.

<http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=5e14ed3a-

4cff-4319-baaa-ac18aaf05bc8%40sessionmgr4002&hid=4105>

“Economic Structure of China.” EW World Economy Team. Economywatch.com.

Web. 4 Jun. 2013.

<http://www.economywatch.com/world_economy/china/structure-of-

economy.html>
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Li,Jiacheng. Chen,Jing. “Banzhuren and Classrooming: Democracy in the Chinese

Classroom”. International Journal of Progressive Education; Oct, 2013, Vol. 9

Issue 3, p91-106, 16p

< inased.org/v9n3/ijpev9n3.pdf>

Onsman,Andrys. Cameron,Jackie. “Democracy and International Higher Education in

China”. Australian Universities’ Review, v56 n2 p4-13, 2014. 10 pp.

<http://www.eric.ed.gov/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?

accno=EJ1047081 >

“The World Report 2015: China.” Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch, 9 Jan.

2015. Web. 9 Jan. 2015.

<https://www.hrw.org/asia/china-and-tibet>

Wang,Gang. Wu,Liyun. Han,Rongbin. “College education and attitudes toward

democracy in China: an empirical study.” Asia Pacific Education Review, 4

August 2015, 16(3):399-412

<http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12564-015-9386-5/fulltext.html>

Zhang,Xiulan. “China's Education Development and Policy,1978-2008”. Leiden:

Koninklijke Brill NV.