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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Society for Psychological Anthropology
Cosponsored - Oral Presentation Session
Yukun Zeng
Ph.D Candidate
The University of Chicago
Aligned with anthropological literature on the “psycho-boom” in contemporary China (Kleinman
2010, Zhang 2014, Huang 2015), this paper pays special attention on the emergent Confucian
developmental and educational psychology in Chinese child-raising practices (cf. Kuan 2015)
through the lens of an educational movement called dujing. Referring ‘to read’ (du) ‘canons’
(jing), dujing is a movement in which students read Confucian texts aloud, repetitively,
intensively, and without exegesis. Established in Taiwan in 1994, dujing has been popular in
mainland China since the 2000s. Millions of people have committed to dujing, sending their
children to private dujing institutes and often ceasing the compulsory public schooling. The
kernel of dujing theory is that children are superb at memorizing before 13 years old and then the
capacity of understanding starts to grow, therefore children should spend the golden age on
absorbing canonical moral wisdom and expects to actualize it in the long-term future. Dujing
theory hybridizes western developmental psychology, indigenous educational psychology in
ancient China, and global canonical traditions. This paper analyzes how, given the political
economy and moral landscape in contemporary China, dujing’s developmental and educational
psychology could articulate Chinese parents’ educational concerns and how dujing movement
socialize families to a “Confucian” mode of radical hope (Lear 2006) or ‘fate’ (ming). Drawing
on theoretical toolkits of value, language ideology and language socialization, this paper joins
the effort to operationalize contemporary PRC Confucianism in people’s everyday affect,
practice, and ethics instead of reducing it to a cultural essence or top-down ideological
engineering (Yang 2017).