Undergraduate Students' Value Orientations and Attitudes towards Civic Education : A Case Study in the Chinese Context

Abstract

Along with China's rapidly economic development since Deng Xiaoping's open-door policy in 1978, concerns of Chinese political transformation and democratization have been dramatically increasing. As the civic education is regarded to have a significant power in shaping students’ democratic awareness and political activism, it will accordingly have an intimate connection with China’s political reform and national development in the coming years. With such a consideration, the objective of this study is to find out to what extent the civic education in Chinese universities has been sufficiently, effectively and efficiently corresponding with the undergraduates’ value orientations and ideological constructs. More specifically, by conducting a survey design in the form of a self-completion questionnaire, this study presents and discusses Chinese undergraduate students’ value orientations as well as their evaluation of the civic education’s impact in promoting different values. In the end, students have shown a deeper concern for familial, social and personal values rather than national and religious ideas in their value orientations. On the other hand, students have perceived a very strong emphasis of civic education on cultivating nation-oriented values, making political consensus, and fostering national attachment. Therefore, with regard to the distance between students’ ideological constructs and their undergraduate civic education, the dislocation of levels of importance in nation-oriented values may be worth noticing and questioning very much.