Taiwan (officially known as the Republic of China, hereafter roc) is bounded by the Pacific Ocean to the east and is located off the southwest coast of Okinawa, Japan, north of the Philippines. Taiwan has a population of 23.82 million people, with about 84 per cent being Taiwanese, 14 per cent Mainland Chinese, and 2 per cent Taiwanese Aborigines. The capital city of Taipei is widely regarded as the political, economic, and cultural centre of Taiwan, which is renowned for its fascinating blend of traditional and modern cultures. Officially, the most common and largely understood language of Taiwan is Mandarin Chinese. Except for their writing systems, Mandarin Chinese (standard Taiwanese Mandarin, the national language of the roc) is almost identical to the official language of Mainland China, known as standard Chinese (Putonghua). The other two major languages are Hokkien (commonly known as Taiwanese), which is spoken by the Taiwanese Hoklo people who descended from immigrants who came from southern Fujian Province during the Qing Dynasty, and Hakka, a variant of the Chinese language adopted by Hakka people who came to Taiwan from Guangdong Province.

The history of human settlement on the island of Taiwan dates back to the arrival of the Austronesian people (or Austronesian-speaking people), ancestors of many of the tribal people who still live in Taiwan, between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago. ‘Austronesian peoples’ is a term that refers to people who live in Southeast Asia, Oceania, and the African island of Madagascar and who are speakers of Austronesian languages.

Please answer the following questions. Except where specified, please tick (✓) the appropriate box.

Section 1

• 1. Do you think music reveals values of human society?

• 2. What values are important to your music teaching? (Tick any boxes you feel apply.)

• 3. Do you think school music reveals the values of human society?

• 4. Do you welcome the idea of having compulsory music education for the whole of primary and secondary music education as part of lifelong education?

• 5. Do you believe learning music facilitates learning other subjects and/or enhances skills that students use in other learning areas?

• 6. Do you think extended music education (or extracurricular music activities) has a positive effect on the social achievements of students in schooling?

• Section 2

• 7. I like to teach the music culture of other countries.

• 8. I like to teach traditional Chinese music and Chinese folk music.

• 9. I like to teach local music culture.

• 10. Do you think that we should help students acquire more knowledge of traditional Chinese culture and custom in your music teaching?

• 11. Do you think that we should help students acquire more knowledge of multicultural education in your music teaching?

• 12. Do you find yourself capable of teaching multicultural education in school?

• ▭ No The reasons are: (Please only “✓” the three most important factors.)

• ( ) Not given adequate training

• ( ) Not enough teaching materials

• ( ) Not welcomed by students

• ( ) Not supported/encouraged by my school

• ( ) Not my interest to teach world music

• ( ) Not enough time in my teaching schedule

• ( ) Not important to teach, as compared with traditional Western and Chinese music in music learning

• ( ) Other reasons (please state:)

• ▭ Yes The reasons are: (Please only “✓” the three most important factors.)

• ( ) Adequate training

• ( ) Enough teaching materials

• ( ) Welcomed by students

• ( ) Supported/encouraged by my school

• ( ) My preference is to teach world music

• ( ) Enough time in my teaching schedule

• ( ) Important to teach and learn, having equal status to traditional Western and Chinese music in music learning

• ( ) Other reasons (please state:)

• 13. Which subjects do you believe should include information about other cultures?

As the title suggests, this book is concerned with the dynamics between globalization and nationalism in school music education. This is closely related to my own personal education and research experience over the last two decades – my bewilderment with and reflections on the prescribed texts and their discussion of how education juggles the relationships between global and national cultures. This book will attempt to trace and examine these efforts through a reflective and critical analysis that responds to the evolving sociopolitical environment and makes the contents of the music education curriculum socially relevant.

Globalization and nationalism are recognized as driving forces for change in today's school education. Since the early 1990s, many nations, both Western and non-Western, have recognized that teaching and learning are complex activities that incorporate the need to negotiate between national and global frames of reference that have evolved from social and cultural contexts. This negotiation has been reflected in the struggles between the socio-economic, political, and cultural tasks of curricula within and between communities and throughout the world. Cultural diversity, exchange, and hybridity have become facts of life in education. For many, globalization as knowledge, as found in data and ideas, has amounted to new horizons, but it has also challenged the imagery of a state-centric world in education. At the same time, nations regard education as something that should be homogenized by the official authorities in school education, as is perceived to be the case in China, Japan, and Korea.

China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have long been crucibles for cross-cultural encounters between Chinese and Western cultures. They have different political ecologies (in terms of their relative levels of democracy), and Hong Kong and Taiwan have different relationships with China. These two factors have affected the meaning of ‘home country’ or ‘Chineseness’, and therefore the promotion of national identity and nationalism in education and music education are different in these three Chinese societies. The changes in the school music education systems of Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are a response to social transitions in Greater China in relation to development and governance across the region. These societies’ ‘Chineseness’ has been described as a potentially unifying regional identity that can be counterposed against Westernization. It should be noted that Hong Kong society was built on British foundations and adopted English and Western values, even though the locals are ethnic Chinese. Though Taiwan is significantly Chinese, Chinese nationalism in Taiwan continues to change, and school education has attempted to re-imagine Taiwan in a new context of Taiwanese consciousness and Taiwanese ethnicity in its semiotic dimension. Thus, the theme of ‘Greater China’ or ‘Chineseness’ in the imaginary region has been the dilemma in the possible discursive associations that arise from the continuing transformation of school music in response to the recent political and sociocultural developments in these three Chinese territories.

After the announcement of Deng Xiaoping's ‘Open Door Policy’ in 1978, China experienced a gradual transition from a state-owned economy to a socialist market economy. The Four Modernizations project for agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology – launched in December of that year – quickly became outdated due to the rapid expansion of transnational capital in the 1980s and economic stagnation around the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident. The term ‘socialist market economy’ was introduced by Jiang Zemin during the 14th National Congress of the CPC in 1992 to describe the goal of China's economic reforms. The shift from a planned economy to mixed forms of private and public ownership within a market environment represented a new historic breakthrough in the reforms and opening up and created entirely new prospects for China's political, economic, and cultural progress between the 1990s and the 2000s. In November 2012, President Xi Jinping promoted a new slogan, the ‘Chinese Dream’ (Zhongguo Meng: a popular term in the prc describing a personal and national ethos and a set of ideas), to represent his ideals for national development and to uphold the ruling ideology of his new leadership. Xi Jinping's Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era was included in the cpc's Constitution during the 19th National Congress in October 2014.

The Chinese Dream is associated with President Xi's goal of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation (Callahan 2015a, 2015b, 2017; Ferdinand 2016).

With particular reference to China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, this chapter is an attempt to think through the cultural and national issues in these three Chinese regions in the twenty-first century. This will be accomplished through an analysis of how the cultural identity of these localities was formed, in response to the political ideology found in Asian and China Studies.

Though Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan were influenced by the West in differing degrees, Western imperialism brought modern Western ideas and concepts as well as Western education systems and music education into all of these societies. China was never a colony (unlike Hong Kong and Taiwan), but it was influenced by other foreign cultures throughout the centuries. The ‘cultural imperialism’ thesis laid out by Carnoy (1974: 1) posits that Western formal education in colonies was consistent with the aims of imperialism and that it was ‘an important institution for transmitting knowledge and culture from generation to generation’. Carnoy maintained that ‘Western schooling in the Third World and in the industrialized countries themselves’ was not the liberating force it was portrayed as but rather part of a complex web of ‘imperialist domination’ (ibid.: 3). Similarly, Altbach and Kelly (1978) claim that the purpose of education reflected the interests of the colonizers: though there were differences in the advanced schooling of colonizers from diverse countries, the various regimens had in common an underlying principle that education should be instrumental or functional in fulfilling the needs and discernments of the colonizers rather than the colonized (also see Bray 1992; Hayhoe 2015; Takeshi and Mangan 1997).

My interest in exploring theoretical issues and empirical knowledge about the relationship between nationalism, school music education, and social change in an increasingly globalized world is closely related to my journey as a researcher of contemporary Chinese studies. While Hong Kong and Taiwan are subject to claims that they are part of China, both have also been detached from Mainland China for long periods, and in recent years their affairs with it have endured fundamental changes. For example, Hong Kong's relationship with China has become closer as a result of economic integration and the 1997 transfer of political sovereignty. Their relationship has been further intertwined by the Beijing-approved National Security Law (nsl), unanimously passed in Hong Kong on 30 June 2020 (i.e., on the eve of the 23rd anniversary of Hong Kong's handover) and enacted on 1 July 2020. Regarding Taiwan's relationship with China, Beijing regards Taiwan as a Chinese province that will ultimately be part of Mainland China again.

Since the early 2000s, relations between China and Hong Kong have been relatively tense, including different interpretations of the ‘one country, two systems’ principle. These tensions have continued with the mass protests, beginning in June 2019, against a proposed extradition bill perceived as allowing dissidents to be transferred to China, which included a march of two million people (as claimed by the organizers) on 16 June 2019. The bill was withdrawn in September, but demonstrations demanding full democracy in Hong Kong continued in the last quarter of 2019. In April 2020, China's liaison office in Hong Kong called for national security legislation and controversially declared that China had comprehensive jurisdiction over Hong Kong. The draft of Hong Kong's national security legislation was voted on at the end of the third session of the thirteenth National People's Congress on 28 May 2020. It was passed on 30 June. Also in June, the Hong Kong government passed the National Anthem Law, which criminalizes any abuse of the Chinese national anthem. Culture, politics, and selective forms of knowledge have become central coordinating lenses through which to view Hong Kong's school education.

On the other hand, Taiwan's identification as a part of China has become increasingly ambiguous as the process of democratization and localization that began in Taiwan in the 1980s has allowed sovereignty to be practiced through the development of a ‘Taiwan consciousness’ (Taiwan yishi) among the Taiwanese people.

The topic of values has been important in educational, philosophical, psychological, and sociological research for over a century. Cultures have certain values, beliefs, customs, and social behaviours, whereas societies encompass people who share mutual values and beliefs. The term ‘culture’ conveys a system of values, beliefs, and symbols – a system analytically discernible from ‘society’, which includes groups, roles, and norms (see Durkheim 1964; Thompson 1998). Hofstede's discussion of cultural values (1991) identified the dominance of cultural values over behaviours and acknowledged that cultural values communicate and sustain particular norms of interaction and understanding, which are emulated in the communicative behaviours of individuals (also see Hofstede 2001). Stuart Hall produced an impressive body of work on the relationship between culture and power and on the formative role of culture as a political and educational practice, produced and mediated within different social contexts, spatial relations, and historical junctures (see Giroux 2000). Foucault (1982, 1998) understood both power and knowledge as textual: power and knowledge are not seen as independent entities but are inextricably intertwined. Meanwhile, knowledge and culture simultaneously state the condition of the world and reproduce political beliefs and values (Giroux 2000; also see Apple 1996, 2014; Hall 1997).

Values are the guiding force of education as well as of teaching and learning school subjects, including the humanities, commerce, and science.

Hong Kong is positioned at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta on the coast of southern China and adjoins Guangdong Province in Mainland China. The city is considered a gateway between the East and the West. ‘British Hong Kong’ refers to the period under British crown rule after Hong Kong was ceded to Great Britain by China's Qing Dynasty following the First Anglo-Chinese War (also known as the First Opium War, 1839-1842). In 1898, Britain was granted an additional 99 years of rule over Hong Kong under the Second Convention of Peking, which included an extension of Hong Kong's territory. The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration was an important and historical watershed in the political development of Hong Kong's promulgation of ‘The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China’. It stated that Hong Kong people could live under the ‘one country, two systems’ principle for a period of 50 years after the handover on 1 July 1997, under the name ‘Hong Kong, China’. This declaration guaranteed Hong Kong a 50-year right to maintain its own capitalist system and way of life and to enjoy a high degree of autonomy in all matters except foreign policy and defence. The declaration marked the beginning of Hong Kong's decolonization and the convergence of its social system with that of the PRC.