Rehumanising China’s school curriculum as a decolonial entanglement

Western modernity, as a globalized episteme, has largely colonised curriculum in theory and praxis worldwide. As a decolonial gesture against Western modernity, this paper examines China’s efforts post-1980s to rehumanise the school curriculum, efforts at the crossroads between nationalism and globalism. Specifically, it focuses on one non-official University-School Partnership League that claims to re-make Chinese children into culturally ‘rooted and souled’ human beings, rather than neoliberalised-psychologised individuals. My examination proceeds in three stages. First, it problematises the statement, ‘culture is the nation’s root and soul’, which I see as both popularist and as furthering the nationalist agenda. The statement stands as an epistemic theme that grounds the League’s call for China’s education to take an onto-cultural turn. Second, it scaffolds the League’s decolonial curriculum vision of nurturing culturally ‘rooted and souled’ human beings. Third, it demonstrates ‘reading-aloud’ as a culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP), as foregrounded by one League member school, in learning Short Chinese Classical Texts. In so doing, this paper critiques China’s decolonial rehumanising school curriculum efforts as an epistemic entanglement of past and present and of East and West, alerting us to a rising nationalism that might overdrive these decolonial efforts toward a cultural relativism.