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The goal of this article is to examine how the provincial education media in China play a role of forging consensus among local actors responsible for the implementation of new centrally-promulgated youth socialization policy. In doing so, it also explores the tension among three of the Chinese state's claims to legitimacy: economic development, moral education, and the decentralization of policy implementation. The article concludes that while economic development and decentralization create problems for the implementation of socialization policy at the local level, the central state still gains legitimacy for its role in promoting morality among the rising generation.

This article uses results from a cross-national analysis of the impact of varying approaches to civic education curriculum delivery on three learning outcomes, to draw conclusions about the value of a government-mandated compulsory, independent subject of civic education in the school curriculum. It starts from the context of Hong Kong, where there have been repeated calls for the government to reform civic education, and compares this context with that of England, where citizenship education was made a statutory subject in 2002. The article then examines from the cases of 25 societies whether a compulsory approach to and/or independent subject of civic education is associated with better learning of civic knowledge, knowledge of democracy, and patriotism. Finding that the impact of curricular approaches is somewhat negligible taking other factors into consideration, the article concludes that civic education reformers should consider the costs of limiting school autonomy in curriculum delivery. (Contains 9 tables.)

The focus of this article is on Hong Kong and mainland Chinese university student reactions, in two time periods, to national themes in education as part of state attempts to establish and maintain legitimacy. The author argues that among these reactions is one of resistance to the process of state hegemony. To make this point, the article builds on several arguments derived from the literature on citizenship education in mainland China and in colonial and postcolonial Hong Kong. According to these arguments, national themes were neglected in civic education in colonial Hong Kong but gained prominence within educational policy discourse with the return of the territory to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. The analysis presented in this article brings the concept of hegemony into the discussion of state claims to legitimacy in order to emphasize that numerous such claims form a constantly shifting complex in the state's attempt to maintain popular consent in a society in which oppositional politics are always present. In turn, the concept of hegemony and its need for continuous adaptation in the face of opposition brings the analysis to its focus on resistance, entailing perceptions of hegemony, reactions of critique, and potential effects on citizens' attitudes and behaviors that are contrary to the state's intentions. With critical-thinking dispositions operationalizing resistance, the remainder of the analysis focuses on Hong Kong and mainland Chinese university students as the targets of state hegemony and on the interrelationships among their attitudes toward the nation, perceptions of political socialization, and critical thinking. The article attempts to capture the possibility of change at a critical moment by examining differences between two cohorts of students attending universities in 2000 and 2005. (Contains 8 tables and 4 footnotes.)

This article attends to comparative education scholars' calls for more dialogue on the contribution of theory to comparative education research. It first presents the results of a review of a small sample of articles from comparative education related journals that elicited the purposes of their comparative research strategies in terms of exploration, explanation, argument, prediction, recommendation, and theory development. The article then discusses perspectives on the potential for the use of theory to contribute to richer explanations of educational phenomena. Finally, it demonstrates how a comparative study of political socialization in Hong Kong and Mainland China led to the development of explanatory concepts of critical thinking and the application and reconceptualization of the theory of resistance to explain the formation of students' attitudes towards the nation.

This article examines the reflection of national goals and ideologies in the civic education curricula of Mainland China and Taiwan. A comparison of junior secondary school textbooks from the 1950s and the 1990s shows how the curriculum embodies the states' changing national priorities and justificatory ideologies. Specifically, in the early period, the focus of the curriculum was on goals and values which distinguished each state from the other. By the 1990s, despite continuing ideological differences, there was a common focus on the importance of economic and social development. (Contains 4 tables.)