Asian Ethnicity

ISSN: 1463-1369 (Print) 1469-2953 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/caet20

Paradox of multiculturalism: invisibility of

‘Koreanness’ in Chinese language curriculum

Fang Gao

To cite this article: Fang Gao (2015): Paradox of multiculturalism: invisibility of ‘Koreanness’ in
Chinese language curriculum, Asian Ethnicity, DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2015.1090373

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2015.1090373

Published online: 03 Nov 2015.

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 Asian Ethnicity, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2015.1090373

Paradox of multiculturalism: invisibility of ‘Koreanness’ in Chinese

language curriculum
Fang Gao*

Department of International Education and Lifelong Learning, The Hong Kong Institute of
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Education, Tai Po, Hong Kong

China’s diverse minorities (shaoshu minzu) with various languages and cultures have
much experience with the push and pull of homogenizing forces and indigenous
cultures, representing a context-specific paradox of multiculturalism. Within the frame-
work of Fei Xiaotong’s duoyuan yiti geju (plurality within unity), attempts have been
made by the Chinese government in the provision of education for its ethnic minorities
in order to balance ethnic diversity and national unity with an assumed pluralistic
nature. Taking curriculum as a form of identity politics, this study provides insights
into the role of the Chinese language curriculum in molding its minority readers’
identity that is embodied in an ambivalence of national-ethnic identity configuration.
This study relies on the content analysis of official syllabus and 12 volumes of Chinese
language textbooks for ethnic Korean children throughout the six years of primary
schooling. It concludes that the language curriculum serves to reinforce its minority
readers with a sense of nationalism, thereby rendering ethnic minority culture and
value systems that can contribute to the development of ethnic identity under multi-
culturalism, almost invisible. The study’s findings call for a shift of focus in curricula
from the indoctrination of the Chinese culturalism for social control to an increasing
emphasis on a variety of cultural knowledge and the fostering of critical thinking and
application of the cultural knowledge in an inclusive society.
Keywords: multiculturalism; identity politics; curriculum; ethnicity; nationalism

Introduction
Education for ethnic minorities, with respect to the Chinese context, has been a significant
research area, given the large number of China’s officially recognized 55 minorities, who
accounted for about 110 million.1 At all levels of China’s education system offered to
these minorities, two ideologies dialectically exist within the framework of Fei
Xiaotong’s2 duoyuan yiti geju (plurality within unity) and they characterize the ambiva-
lence of national-ethnic identity configuration. One ideology is a progressive that high-
lights ‘diversity’ (‘duoyuan’) side and advocates China as a harmonious multicultural
nation, and the other as a growing conservative that calls for more emphasis on ‘unity’
(‘yiti’) side and a return to nationalism in curriculum. Grounded in such ambivalence in
identity formation, our work, taking curriculum as a tool of identity politics, examines
how the Chinese language curriculum represents sociocultural identities of its Korean
readers.

*Email: fgao@ied.edu.hk

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

 2 F. Gao

The Korean, labeled as ‘model minority’ (youxiu minzu), is the fourteenth largest non-
Han nationality with a population of 1,830,929 in 2010,3 residing mainly in the three
north-eastern provinces of Jilin, Heilongjiang, and Liaoning. More than 32% (736,991)
Koreans concentrated in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in eastern Jilin
Province. Among China’s 55 ethnic minorities, the Korean is unique as a cross-border
group, who is neither indigenous nor existent in the territory of today’s China for a long
period of time, but migrated to China on a large scale in the relatively recent past (during
1850–1945).4 The ideological discourse (‘model minority’) originally emerged in 1951,
when Ma Xulun, the Minister of Education, singled out Koreans as an outstanding model
for educational accomplishments.5 Statistically, Koreans possess the highest level of
college attendance and the lowest level of illiteracy rates.6 Popular literature cogently
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claims that the heart of Korean achievements is their Confucian-influenced cultural

predisposition, that is, a high attachment to the value of education, which is compatible
with the value of Han Chinese.7 The positive image of ‘model minority’ from the host
society, on the one hand, is responsible for the high vitality of Korean cultural and
language practices via Korean and Chinese bilingual education with an emphasis on the
Korean language as medium of instruction from preschool to tertiary level.8 Such label-
ing, on the other hand, seemingly contributes to hierarchical divisions between the ‘good’,
‘model’ minority and the so-called ‘backward’ minority (e.g. Tibetans) and helps maintain
Han Chinese supremacy.9 Nevertheless, Fairclough10 stresses the intrinsic complexity of
one ideological discourse across time and space. It is evident that ‘model minority’
discourse now has extended into labeling some other minorities (i.e. Mongols) as a
‘model’ and as well with a reorientation to Yanbian as ‘national integration and progress
(guojia tuanjie jinbu) prefecture’, a change that seems to favor the symbolic value of
‘model’ minorities for national cohesion over for the maintenance of ethnicity. To some
extent, such intertwined and contradictory ideological positions reflect China’s political
swings and tensions between pluralism and assimilationism for its minority population,
and thus constantly pose challenges to the roles of education, and of curriculum in
particular in striking a balance between the political and economic imperatives of national
solidarity and the pluralistic realities of China’s diverse communities.
Under the political and ideological context, we choose to textually analyze
Chinese language curricula that are not only a ‘cultural phenomenon in itself’,11
yet also have always been perceived and used by the Chinese government to engage
in identity-construction work, albeit few studies of language textbooks conducted.12
We assume that the language textbook contents construct, position, and strive to
persuade minority child readers of the primacy of deliberately selected and organized
contents and thereby function as a reliable means of ascribing prescribed identity to
readers. The curriculum study analyzes the second-language Chinese textbooks given
to ethnic Korean children throughout the six years of primary schooling in an
attempt to unpack the grounding operations in the process of identity recognition.
Given the significance of sustaining minorities’ ethnic and cultural heritage for the
building of genuine multiculturalism, an analysis of the language curriculum may
develop our understanding of what policy initiatives and curricular reforms in
specific will contribute to the vitality of ethnic identity.

Curriculum and ethnic identity

Critical research in curricula13 has documented that a curriculum is a site of struggle for
recognition and representation and it works to either confirm or deny the cultural
 Asian Ethnicity 3

knowledge, values, and belief systems of the people who learn it, and a curriculum,
through its control of textbook contents, mainly serves to convert the life histories and
experiences of dominant interest groups into people’s ‘common sense’.14 Thus, in the
process of struggle over who decides what to be taught, a curriculum reproduces inequal-
ities in power relations, and signifies a politics of identity; that is, those who hold the
political power use their power to have their identity represented in school curricula.15 In
other words, when certain values and knowledge are assumed as legitimate and come to
circulate more regularly in the curriculum spectrum, a particular sociocultural identity
prevails, which tends to describe particular types of people and the sociocultural roles that
such people typically adopt.16 In reverse, as minority groups who do not hold political
power cannot control what counts as legitimate knowledge in school, their identities are
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not represented in curricula. Thus what is included in a curriculum is selective and may
omit particular values, histories, and cultures. Such omission may transmit an image of
country as a homogenous/monolithic ‘imagined community’17 to the masses for promot-
ing national unity,18 but simultaneously manifests itself by either a mal-recognition or
even nonrecognition of some aspects of selves such as ethnicity among the less powerful
minority groups.19
An abundance of research generally emphasizes the potential of curricula to shape and
maintain the ethnic identity of students by including ethnic minority cultures into textbook
contents, and such inclusion is considered conducive to positive racial attitudes and to the
protection of minority cultural heritage and equal benefit of minority students in
education.20 However, empirical studies on curriculum and ethnic identity have found
that curricula are frequently aligned with dominant policies and ideologies and therefore
are used as institutionalized ways to mal-recognize or even exclude the identity of ethnic
minority students.21 For example, Hickling-Hudson and Ahlquist22 in their research of
school curriculum given to the indigenous Australian and Native American children
suggest that the curriculum does not make any reference to the minority groups’ culture,
history, and experiences of life. Similarly, in examining the role of Spanish foreign
language curriculum in shaping ethnic identities of students of diverse backgrounds,
Arizpe and Aguirre23 note that the textbooks present distorted, confused, and at times
erroneous information about ethnic minority groups in the special context. Ahonen24 and
Lall25 summarize that rather than maintain minority cultures, national curricula tend to
serve for nation-building and societal control and are thus framed within the grand
narrative of nationalism. Critical scholars thus argue that the disassociation between
minorities’ cultural heritage and curriculum has significant consequences for students’
sense of belonging to own ethnic community and for educational success among ethnic
minorities.26 A lack of representation or mis-representation/recognition may naturalize
racism against minority groups27 and account for the school failure of minority students.28
As Taylor29 notes

Our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of
others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people
or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture
of themselves. (25, emphasis in original)

Hansen’s30 fieldwork in Southwest China has attested to the little direct bearing of state
education on minority students’ ethnic identity and cultural practices. Postiglione and his
research team31 on education for Tibetans in China conclude that official curricula are
little multicultural and often advocate the ideological themes of national unity and
 4 F. Gao

patriotism. Both representative studies are not concentrated solely on curriculum analysis,
where the current study attempts to fill this gap by examining the role of the Chinese
language curriculum in the formation of ethnic identity. Building on the close relation-
ships between curriculum and student experience of identity formation,32 the textual
analysis in this study interrogates the ways in which ethnic Koreans are manifested within
the microcosm of the language curriculum that is politically, economically, and socio-
culturally implicated in the construction of identity. It aims to question who holds the
power over what sociocultural identities are represented in curriculum against a backdrop
of the ‘model minority’ ideology with its intrinsic complexity and contradiction.
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Methodology
Official syllabus and 12 volumes of Chinese language textbooks given to ethnic Korean
children throughout the six years of primary schooling are the concentration of analysis. The
chosen 12 volumes of Chinese language textbooks cover entire six grades of primary
schooling (used by children of ages 7–12), with two volumes for each academic year/
grade in national Korean schools (government-established and participated overwhelmingly
by Korean students), mainly scattered in northeastern regions. The textbooks were published
by Yanbian Education Publication House (Yanbian jiaoyu chubanshe) in 2004, and were
subject to the censorship of the central authority of school curriculum development.
Specifically, the Yanbian jiaoyu chubanshe publishes Chinese language textbooks attached
to the textbooks nationwide published by the People’s Education Press, authorized by the
Ministry of Education, while taking Korean students’ levels of Chinese language proficiency
into account. It is generally assumed that such textbooks are about two grades lower than
those used in regular Han schools with a dominating Han Chinese student population.33
The textual analysis made valid inferences from texts and explored the dialectic
relationships between identity formation and legitimate knowledge included.34 A ‘text’
in this study is referred to as any instance of written language and images that has
coherence and coded meanings in the textbooks. The first step of analysis was to identify
ethnicity contained in selected textbooks. The process of identification was based on the
question: ‘Are ethnic minorities in general and ethnic Koreans in particular represented in
the textbooks?’ All the ‘texts’ pertaining to ethnic language, culture, or value orientations
were identified for further analysis. Then we moved on to an inter-textual analysis to
identify themes and orientations in the texts, based on the research question: ‘What topics
are discussed among ethnic minorities in general and ethnic Koreans in particular?’ The
aim was to establish a matrix of categories/areas across the texts on the grounds that they
were ‘on the same topic’ and shared ‘the similar point of view’. What followed was the
detailed analysis of those written/pictorial texts in each category in order to examine the
question: ‘How are cultural values constructed through recurrent statements, wordings,
and/or imageries in texts?’ We treated the ‘texts’ as discursive constructions,35 and looked
into forms of lexical choices, grammatical features, syntactical structures, and pictorial
contents of the ‘texts’ in each identified category. Through analyzing what identity
positions were made available to minority readers within them, this study scrutinized if
the textbook contents made ‘ethnic Korean’ visible, and how.

Findings
The analysis of ‘texts’ and inter-textual relations in relation to the representation of the 55
recognized minorities in the textbooks and in terms of recognizable identities of Koreans
 Asian Ethnicity 5

Table 1. Emerging themes and relevant texts.

Number of
Emerging themes texts

The ‘H (High) language’ Mandarin Chinese vs. ‘L (Low) language’ Korean 2

The lack of representation and mal-representation of minority cultural knowledge, 6
particularly Korean cultural knowledge

in specific indicates that 8 ‘texts’ have bearing on minority languages and cultures, 4 out
of which are particularly relevant to Korean cultural heritage, and in total the 8 texts lead
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two dominant themes to arise (Table 1). The two themes are (1) the ‘H (High) language’
Mandarin Chinese vs. ‘L (Low) language’ Korean (2 ‘texts’) and (2) the lack of repre-
sentation and mal-representation of minority cultural knowledge, particularly Korean
cultural knowledge (6 ‘texts’). The textual analysis of the themes suggests that a para-
doxical celebration of diversity in language, culture, and value system, as crucial in a
pluralist society, is given on surface, but in effect, textbook contents almost have no
substantial relevance to Korean language and culture, which is either invisible or mis-/
mal-represented in the curriculum.

The ‘H (High) language’ Mandarin Chinese vs. ‘L (Low) language’ Korean

In general terms, the language(s) spoken by the dominant group always tend(s) to be
the ‘H (high) language’ with more prestige and status, whereas minority language
represents the ‘L (low) language’ with a lower social status. However, more and more
sociolinguists36 argue that the hegemony of H language is not stable, and it is possible
that L language also occupies a prestigious status. Given the sociopolitical and
economic factors among ethnic Koreans, language function turns out to be more
complex in the case of diglossia situation between Mandarin Chinese and Korean.37
For one thing, the H language (Mandarin) is the lingua franca across all societal
sectors and strata of China and it has a strong affective value for nationhood and
national identity.38 Moreover, its dominating status has been strengthened by China’s
economic reforms since the end of 1970s. For another, the L language (Korean) serves
as a tool for communal solidarity and affective bonding among Korean people, but at
the same time, it occupies the increasingly instrumental values and importance espe-
cially in cross-border business and transnational commerce with two Koreas on the
Peninsula.39 South Korean trade and investment in China and massive migration of
ethnic Koreans to South Korea40 make explicitly the added value of the Korean
language for the transnational endeavors. Yet, in the Chinese language syllabus and
textbooks, the Korean language’s instrumental functions are completely ignored. What
is highlighted, instead, is the hierarchical stratification between Mandarin Chinese and
Korean in favor of Chinese as the symbolic capital beyond other languages in China.
As written in the curriculum syllabus:

Chinese is a basic subject. Learning Chinese is of paramount importance to ethnic minority

students since it is crucial for learning other subjects, and for future work and further studies,
and also for the inheritance and development of the Chinese civilization, and for a quality
improvement among ethnic minorities.41
 6 F. Gao

This narrative discursively constructs the integrative and instrumental motivations of

learning Chinese in (1) promoting minority individuals’ social mobility and (2) quali-
fying the minority-concentrated regions materially and spiritually. On the one hand, it
implies that those with an insufficient Chinese language competency will be sidelined
in social stratification and mobility; on the other hand, it advocates that to learn
Chinese is to be civilized; to be civilized is the key for the development of minorities.
It thus consolidates ‘China’s civilizing project’ ideology, premised on Chinese cultur-
alism, which is claimed to be more advanced and should be given to more ‘backward’
ethno-regional minorities.42 This ‘text’ has a tendency to showcase the ingrained
prejudice against China’s minorities on the basis of ‘we’ (Han) and ‘others’ (mino-
rities) dichotomy and it continues adherence to a belief in the hierarchical Confucian
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culturalism, the Marxist-framed five-stage classification and the unilinear development

of socialist modernity.43
The hierarchical dichotomy is further strengthened by another text in the volume
nine, which is a ‘learning guideline’ to language learning activities, and explicitly
spurs the learning of Mandarin Chinese again by the title and the content that
follows:

Enter the world of Chinese characters [hanzi]

We keep in contact with hanzi everyday, but to what extent do you understand hanzi?
Hanzi appeared approximately four thousand years ago, and consist of many unsolved
mysteries during the long-term process of evolution.
Hanzi are the most used characters in the world and hanzi ever influenced the development of
characters of Japanese and Korean. Now, more and more foreigners are learning hanzi and
Mandarin . . ..
You must want to learn more about hanzi! Then, let’s enter the world of hanzi together, and
engage in comprehensive learning. During the course of understanding Chinese culture and
appreciating the attraction of hanzi, [let’s] deepen our love for hanzi, improve the capacity of
learning hanzi, and learn hanzi effectively and efficiently in order to roam in the world of
hanzi as soon as possible.44

The text first generates in the child readers a sense of curiosity about Chinese characters
(hanzi). Then, in the following two paragraphs, it describes hanzi’s historical develop-
ment and enormous effects upon the development of other languages (including
Korean). These descriptions help to transmit the child readers a pride in and a sense
of love for the language, whose symbolic value is also self-evident by the increased
number of foreign learners, leveling the language up to an international status. The text
ends with an assertion that ‘You must want to learn more about hanzi!’. The use of
‘must’ in an absolute way positions the young readers to nothing but conform to the
calls from the authority of the textbooks. By using the inclusive pronoun ‘us’ instead of
‘me’, this text sets up a solidarity with its child readers; and by using a sequence of
verbs in an imperative mood – ‘deepen’, ‘improve’, and ‘learn’, its authority is further
reinforced. On top of Mandarin Chinese’s functions for personal mobility and ethnic
community development, as shown in the curriculum syllabus, this text reinforces the
language’s value whether on its own stand or not. In the end, the metaphoric use of
‘roam in the world of hanzi’ illustrates a proactive attitude toward Chinese language
learning and toward subsequent fluency in it, and thus strengthens the utility of hanzi as
‘symbolic/linguistic capital’45 in the society.
 Asian Ethnicity 7

The lack of representation and mal-representation

There are in total 6 texts in the 12 volumes, which have relevance to cultural knowledge
of ethnic minorities. Three written texts fall into the categories of ‘the natural beauties of
ethnic minority-concentrated areas in China’, ‘the great culture of minority regions and
people’, and ‘the happy life of ethnic Korean people’.46 There are another three ‘texts’,
both written and pictorial, that position ethnic Koreans in relation to China, North Korea,
and South Korea. The first three texts are focally given in the beginning of the second
semester in the 5th grade, that is, in volume ten. Unit one of volume ten is composed of
three texts plus one extra-reading. The second and third texts in this unit, respectively,
describe ‘Bamboo Houses’ that Dai people (one of the 55 minority groups in China)
reside in the Province of Yunnan, and ‘The North Tibet Grassland’. The extra-reading
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introduces to Korean child readers traditional games of Koreans – ‘swinging’, ‘board

springing’, and ‘wrestling’. ‘Bamboo Houses’ text selects one cultural site that features
the structure of houses by Dai people. The text of ‘The North Tibet Grassland’ fore-
grounds the beauty of grassland in Tibet. No exception, the three texts present the
uniqueness of minority cultures and geographical landscapes, as well as the greatness of
minority people – Dais, Tibetans, and Koreans, who make an efficient use of the natural
resources (e.g. bamboos and grassland) and live their fruitful and happy life. For example,
one paragraph in the text of ‘The North Tibet Grassland’ writes

North-Tibetan plateau is gentle. In the sunshine, green grass reflects colorful lights. Of the
most attractive are those snow-white flocks of goats. Little goats quietly eat most tender
growth, with the songs of shepherdesses. Tibetan young men ride the big horses, running,
playing, and laughing . . ..47

The description gives the young readers an image that Tibetan grassland is beautiful and
Tibetan people therein are harmonious. Even though the title of this text somehow orients
to an objective description of Tibetan grassland, the actual wordings are characterized by
more subjective interpretations of reality and involve subjective value judgments by
means of linguistic choices such as ‘gentle’, ‘snow-white’, and ‘tender’. As a whole,
the text delivers the ‘truth’ or ‘commonsense knowledge’ to its readers that life of Tibetan
people who live in the grassland is affluent, and such ‘truth’ has certainly hidden the
ethnic conflicts and social turmoil in the Tibetan area in favor of more seamless narratives
of social cohesion in curricular contents.48 All in all, the three texts construct the sense of
patriotism from the perspective: China is beautiful by nature and people live their happy
life. Such message of national unity is given to the Korean readers particularly at the
beginning of this unit when stating the purpose of learning this unit, ‘Learning this unit
allows us to step into the texts, to appreciate together the deep love for the country, love
for the nationalities, love for the homelands, and to understand the great culture of
China’.49
Another three ‘texts’ presume a nonrecognition of the ethnic ties between ethnic
Koreans of China and Koreans on the Peninsula. Because of the geographic proximity,
ethnic Koreans commonly keep close contacts with those Koreans on the Peninsula,
originally with North Koreans, and subsequently with South Koreans since the late
1980s. In specific, the intense contacts between ethnic Koreans in China and South
Koreans on the Korean Peninsula are coined in the discursive formation of ‘hanguk
baram’ (South Korean wind), which underlies the lives of ethnic Koreans and their
development of allegiances to special aspects of the Korean language and culture.50
Yet, the ethnic and cultural ties between China’s Koreans and North and South Koreans
 8 F. Gao

are completely invisible in the textbooks. The two visual texts, given as ‘The Knowledge
Window’, respectively, exhibit the images of eight countries’ national flags and ethnic
costumes of China’s 12 nationalities (minzu), one of which is Korean minority. The first
visual text juxtaposes China’s national flag with North Korea’s and South Korea’s, and the
second visual text places Korean costume along with other minorities’ and thus implies
that ethnic Koreans are one of China’s nationalities. The third is a written text that
describes the ‘Famous Mountain of North Korea (chaoxian) – Jingang Mountain’.51
This text introduces objectively the mountain’s location, the history of its formation,
and its famous sightseeing sites as well. It starts with a narrative: by the eastern coast of
North Korea, there is an important sightseeing site – Jingang Mountain. Through an
expression of its natural beauty, this text ends by emphasizing that the mountain is an
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important cultural site of North Korea. Throughout the entire description, ethnic Koreans
of China and their ancestral relationship with Koreans on the Peninsula are never men-
tioned. Given the fact that the three ‘texts’ do not expose to any ethnic ties, the Korean
young readers after reading them may get an impression that Korean is one nationality in
China and it is not concerned with either North Korea or South Korea. Such misrecogni-
tion or nonrecognition, as McCarthy and others contend, accounts as a form of ‘symbolic
violence’, resulting in discrimination, marginalization, and subordination of minority
groups. In congruence with the other three texts, the discursive constructions, rather
than pay attention to ethnic complexities, together (re)produce a sense of national
belonging and collective identity for various minorities in China. They play an important
role in constructing patriotic identity among Korean readers.

Discussion and conclusion

An examination of the Chinese language syllabus and textbooks indicates that the
officially censored school textbooks that are adopted for ethnic Korean children, in reality,
give little play to ethnic minority topics. As our analysis has shown, the textbook contents
engender values appropriate to a society of Chinese culturalism, in which the configura-
tion of identity is focally around a national or civic other than an ethnic. We classified and
analyzed the 8 ‘texts’ in the 12 volumes within a text and intertextually in theme and
orientation, in relevance to ethnic minorities in China, particularly to ethnic Koreans. The
two categorized themes together manifest a sense of national belonging and collective
identity for ethnic minorities as citizens in China, whereas the sense of ‘Koreanness’,
namely, the language, culture, history, value, and beliefs of ethnic Koreans, is largely
omitted in the curriculum contents. It is thus not far-fetched to argue that such omission in
curriculum produces at once restricting effects upon the ethnic identity maintenance and
enabling effects on the reinforcement of national identity among the primary-school
Korean readers on the following grounds:
Firstly, the sense of patriotism and national unity is drawn from the textbooks by an
emphasis on the Mandarin Chinese and hanzi learning, which is claimed to have strong
implications for the acquisition of individual’s civilization and mobility, and ethnore-
gional development. In contrast, even though the Korean language status is not expli-
citly negated in the textbooks, its symbolic value (both as affective bonding and as
instrumental ties in transnational business) is not emphasized. Given that the Korean
language is a paramount marker of ethnic Korean identity, and how it is positioned via
the Chinese language curriculum may have implications for the Chinese language
learning at the expense of minority language and culture. Secondly, with regard to
‘the representation of minority cultural knowledge’, three ‘texts’ present the natural
 Asian Ethnicity 9

beauties of ethno-regions, the great cultures of minority people and their happy life.
There is no exception that these ‘texts’ per se deliver a patriotic message to the minority
readers that China is always beautiful by nature and people including minority people
always live their happy and affluent life. It is through such descriptions that a sense of
diversity, represented among China’s peoples, its territories, cultures, and so on, serves
to lead child readers to the love for the country. In addition to the fact that Chinese
culturalism outweighs ethnicity and diversity in the texts, the three ‘texts’, running
counter to an emphasis on genuine multiculturalism, deliberately neglect the ethnic
conflicts and tensions in some minority areas. Furthermore, there is a somehow mis-/
mal-recognition of ethnic Koreans in particular based on a deliberate division between
China’s Korean minority and the Koreans on the Peninsula, a division that renders the
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ethnic ties totally invisible. The mis-/mal-representation or the lack of representation,

more or less, echoes the ideological concentration of ‘model minority’ on national
integration, but hides the innate complexity of Korean minority’s immigration history
and cultural development. Altogether, the six ‘texts’ under the second theme tend to
give the child readers an impression that every nationality is static and consistent and
thereby foreground the solidarity and patriotism among China’s various nationalities.
We thus conclude that minorities groups and especially Korean minority, in
essence, find themselves underrepresented in the curriculum and their voices silenced,
and ethnic identities invisible. Given that the dominating pedagogy in China empha-
sizes the transmission of received knowledge and the testing of students for the correct
answers of the knowledge, the enormous authority of the textbooks and their hidden
ideological messages may be taken for granted by the minority readers, thus leaving no
space for alternative understandings. The current study analyzed the identity ascribed
by the official textbook contents. That is to say, our attention is concentrated on how
the curriculum constructs cultural knowledge of Korean minorities and shapes their
identity. However, students inevitably mediate textbook contents, and each student may
interact with textbook in different ways according to social and personal variables and
in turn may accept, resist, or transform what is given to him/her.52 Future studies thus
may want to take the negotiation of identity into account and explore how minority
readers’ identities are constructed and changed in response to both Chinese and Korean
language textbooks, and how negotiated identities have an impact upon education for
minority students.
Mindful of the importance of maintaining minorities’ ethnic and cultural heritage for
the building of genuine multiculturalism, our research findings call for a shift of focus in
official curricula from the indoctrination of the Chinese culturalism for social control to an
increasing emphasis on the opening of possibilities for alternative understandings of a
variety of cultural knowledge and the fostering of critical thinking and application of the
cultural knowledge in an inclusive society,53 which is multicultural and multilingual in
nature. The recent efforts to provide locally relevant curriculum materials (xiangtu
jiaocai) are a proactive phenomenon of multiculturalism in curricular reform. However,
a multicultural curriculum not only allows minority student readers to get access to what
they are acquainted in the daily lives, but also should empower them to engage in the
openly negotiated meanings of ethnic/cultural diversity within the framework of
multiculturalism.54 Otherwise, we will face either the minority linguistic or cultural
genocide via minority children’s assimilation into the Chinese culturalism or a ‘dual
structure’,55 that is, separation of institutional and cultural systems between the Han and
minorities emerging, and resulting in a ‘critical pluralism’,56 where inter-ethnic conflicts
become unavoidable.
 10 F. Gao

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Fang Gao is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Education and Lifelong
Learning, the Hong Kong Institute of Education. She completed PhD in the Sociology of
Education at the University of Hong Kong in 2008. She has published 21 papers in international
refereed journals and 9 refereed book chapters in the research fields of multicultural education,
educational policy, and structural and institutional racism in teaching and learning. She is also the
author of Becoming a Model Minority: Schooling Experiences of Ethnic Koreans in China
(Lexington Books, 2010).
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Author’s postal address: Department of International Education and Lifelong Learning, The Hong
Kong Institute of Education, 10 Lo Ping Road, Taipo, New Territories, Hong Kong.

Notes
1. NBSC, “China Population Census (6th).”
2. Fei, Zhonghua minzu yanjiu xin tance.
3. Ibid., 1.
4. Lee, China’s Korean Minority.
5. Ma, Minzu zhengce wenxian huibian.
6. Ma, “Zhongguo ge zuqun zhijian,” 174–85.
7. Choi, “The Korean Minority in China,” 119–41; Ibid., 4; Zhou, “Language Attitudes of Two
Contrasting Ethnic Minority Nationalities in China,” 1–20.
8. Gao, “A Comparative Analysis,” 207–22; Ma, Language Practice and Identity.
9. Zhou, “Language Attitudes of Two Contrasting Ethnic Minority Nationalities in China,” 1–20.
10. Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change.
11. Kramsch, “The Cultural Discourse,” 63–86.
12. Liu, “Discourse, Cultural Knowledge and Ideology,” 233–64.
13. For example, Apple, Educating the ‘right’ Way; De Castell et al., Language, Authority and
Criticism.
14. Jenlink and Townes, The Struggle for Identity in Today’s Schools; Luke, Literacy, Textbooks,
and Ideology; Pinar, What is Curriculum Theory?
15. Apple, Power, Meaning, and Identity.
16. Bingham, Schools of Recognition.
17. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
18. Özkirimli, Contemporary Debates on Nationalism.
19. Wortham, “Curriculum as a Resource,” 229–47.
20. Banks, “Multicultural Education,” 617–27; Cummins, Negotiating Identities; Ladson-Billings,
Crossing over to Canaan.
21. For example, Ahonen, ‘Politics of Identity through History Curriculum,” 179–94; Banks,
Educating Citizens; Chan, “Student Experiences of a Culturally-Sensitive Curriculum,”
177–94; Lall, “Educate to Hate,” 103–19.
22. Hickling-Hudson and Ahlquist, “Contesting the Curriculum,” 64–89.
23. Arizpe and Aguirre, “Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban ethnic groups,” 125–37.
24. Ahonen, “Politics of Identity through History Curriculum,” 179–94.
25. Lall, “Educate to Hate,” 103–19.
26. Banks, Educating Citizens.
27. For example, Bryan, “You’ve Got to Teach People,” 599–629.
28. Gay, Culturally Responsive Teaching.
29. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 25–73.
30. Hansen, Lessons in Being Chinese.
31. Postiglione, Zhu, and Jiao, “From Ethnic Segregation to Impact Integration,” 195–217.
32. Pinar, What is Curriculum Theory?
33. Gao, “Challenges of Discourses,” 119–30.
34. Weber, Basic Content Analysis. 2nd ed.
 Asian Ethnicity 11

35. Foucault, L’ordre du discours.

36. For example, Holmes, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics.
37. Gao and Park, “Korean-Chinese Parents’ Language Attitudes,” 539–52.
38. Ibid., 9.
39. Kim, “The Economic Status,” 101–30.
40. KIS, Foreign Nationals in South Korea _ 2011.
41. Yanbian Jiaoyu chubanshe.
42. See also Harrell, Cultural encounters on China’s ethnic frontiers.
43. Iredale, et al., Contemporary minority migration, education and ethnicity in China.
44. Yanbian jiaoyu chubanshe, vol. 9, 104.
45. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power.
46. See also Ibid., 12.
47. Yanbian jiaoyu chubanshe, vol. 10, 14.
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48. See also Apple, Ideology and Curriculum.

49. Yanbian Jiaoyu chubanshe, vol. 10, 1.
50. Choi, “The Korean Minority in China,” 119–41.
51. Yanbian Jiaoyu chubanshe, vol. 8, 128–29.
52. Chan, “Student Experiences of a Culturally-Sensitive Curriculum,” 177–94; Kalmus, “What
Do Pupils and Textbooks Do with Each Other?,” 469–85.
53. See also May, “Critical Multiculturalism and Education,” 33–48.
54. See also Ibid., 26.
55. Ma, “Zhongguo shehui de lingyilei,” 93–103.
56. Postiglione, “The education of ethnic minority groups,” 501–11.

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