Towards Personalistic Rule: Evidence from Textbooks in China

• In Event: Poster Session: Democracy and Autocracy

Abstract

Textbooks play an essential role in education to shape people’s ideology and values, thus influencing the formation of a socio-political culture. While previous research focuses on this socialization mechanism, we look at the topic from a different angle: the selection and determination of textbook content. Unlike in their democratic counterparts, where multiple social and political factors can affect schooling and education, the content of education in non-democratic regimes primarily reflects the government’s policies. It can help reinforce authoritarian rule through ideological and nationalist indoctrination in mass education.

This paper selects China as a case to study and examines how political education reflects the change in the authoritarian ruling style. Since Chinese President Xi Jinping took power, a wide range of changes have happened in decision-making processes within the Chinese central government, such as abolishing presidential term limits in 2017. This change involves debate on whether China is moving from a dominant party regime to a more personalist dictatorship.

We select three editions of the national textbooks in the major of “Morality and Rule of Law” adopted by junior middle schools (Grades 7-9) over the past two decades (2003-2023). We analyze text and non-text contents to identify the change in personalistic traits. We use word embeddings to track the narratives in language and structural topic modeling to track the change of topic prevalence over time. Our findings reveal an increasing emphasis on the president compared to the Chinese Communist Party.

Authors

• Rosemary Pang, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Erico Yu, University of Massachusetts Amherst