China’s Foreign Language Education As Education For Global Citizenship

Entering21stcentury, the world is shrinking into a global village; relationsbetween countries are getting closer and deeper. Meanwhile, issues likecommunication obstacles, cultural conflicts, and ethnocentrism are all comingalong. After adopting reform and opening-up policy, especially entering WTO,China gets more attention from the western society. English becomes increasinglypopular for Chinese. However, speaking English is inadequate, foreign languageeducation can no longer regard linguistic competence as the only target. Todevelop the intercultural communication competence shall be regarded as a way tocultivate global citizenship. Based on the theory of intercultural communicativecompetence raised by Micheal Byram and his critical cultural awareness theory,this thesis focuses on the study of foreign language education and intercultural orglobal citizenship. Through the theory of Chinese scholar Jia Yuxin, the thesisanalyzes how to cultivate global Chinese by integrating new Confucianism “Ren”with western theories.The research found that western citizenship education emphasized democracy,freedom and individuality while Chinese citizenship education highlighted moralstance, responsibility, and obligation. Western intercultural communicativecompetence focuses on developing intercultural communicative competence andcritical cultural awareness. Definition of citizenship, however, varies with timeand space. Thus, China cannot copy the model of western intercultural citizenshipeducation, but should combine its tradition with the western model in order tocreate a model with Chinese characteristics.