Advancing global citizenship education in Japan and China: An exploration and comparison of the national curricula

Abstract

The literature widely reports that national citizenship remains the focus of citizenship education in Japan and China, despite the emerged global elements in both cases. Yet the literature stops short of exploring how to advance the agenda of global citizenship in the dominant national citizenship education under the centralized education systems in Japan and China. With a list of global citizen attributes derived from a particular conception of citizenship, this article identifies and compares the pedagogical capacity and potential for global citizenship education in relevant Japanese and Chinese national curriculum guidelines, many of which have been recently revised. It is found that many attributes are indeed supported in the Japanese and Chinese guidelines, which, furthermore, leave pedagogical potential for the development of unsupported others. The findings at the policy level bear practical and research implications for global citizenship education in Japanese and Chinese schools.