Importing Civic Education into Authoritarian China

While teaching civic engagement is intrinsically suitable to democratic regimes and their norms, similar curriculums could face tremendous obstacles when being taught in authoritarian countries. How could we teach civic engagement in authoritarian states? This chapter discusses the “imported model” by analyzing the experiences of implanting civic education pedagogy into mainland China. The case study of SEED for Social Innovation – an NGO the author co-founded in 2012 – that first brought Chinese trainees to the U.S. and then subsequently took the curriculums to China, is utilized to capture the importing process. Experimental data comparing the effects of teaching the curriculum in the U.S. and China is also analyzed. This chapter argues that when faced with institutional constraints in authoritarian countries, one could still successfully teach civic engagement by training individuals who are grounded in their own cultures and are willing to travel to study civic educations and the pedagogies in democratic cultures. Using these individuals as anchors and through turning the trainees into trainers, successful pedagogical models of civic engagement could be grounded even within an authoritarian context. The experimental data assessing participants’ willingness of civic engagement also reveals that the interventions have as much impact in the workshops conducted in China like those in the U.S. .