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Title: Cultural conflict and Chinese students' relationship to knowledge in contemporary China

Abstract thesis

In a modernizing China where progress is seen by many natives as a "Westernization" process, life is structured by what appears to be a genuine??conflict between the traditional Chinese culture and Western culture. Since, according to Bernard Charlot, our relationship with knowledge is a social trait, this sociocultural conflict must impact how Chinese students relate to knowledge. The thesis we present here strives to study how the relationship that links Chinese university students to knowledge has evolved under the influence of such a cultural conflict. We derive in the first, mostly theoretical, part both historical and sociocultural perspectives that help understand the issues at stake. Then, to better stress how this conflictual life, brought up by the mixing of these two vastly different cultures, pervades Chinese student youth today, we designed and conducted between 2003 and 2006 two series of investigations in various Chinese cities, using both wide-spectrum surveys and more detailed interviews in Guangdong Province. Using both the analysis of the collected data and the more general perspectives introduced in the first part, we suggest that the relationship with knowledge is, for contemporary Chinese students, strongly shaped by their current fascination for materialism, although such a notion is foreign to the traditional Chinese culture, but that it still exhibits features more reminiscent of the traditional Chinese culture, such as pragmatism.

 

Keywords: China, cultural conflict, tradition, Chinese students, relationship to knowledge