Asian Civic Values: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Three East Asian Societies
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Asian Civic Values: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Three East Asian Societies Young Ha Cho • Tae Jun Kim
Published online: 19 November 2012 Ó De La Salle University 2012
Abstract This study cross-culturally explored the way that East Asian lower-secondary school students perceive the peculiar matters of Asian civic values specific to Korea, Chinese Taipei, and Hong Kong using the Asian Regional Module data of the 2009 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study. Methodologically, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were employed to explore the factor model that successfully fits the three East Asian societies. Latent mean analysis was then conducted to measure between-nation mean differences. Overall, East Asian students tended to be negative against an undemocratic government and unfairness based on guanxi and moderately critical of the issues related to the independence of the judiciary. Asian identity and democratic values for a civil society were both accepted as valuable with moderate respect for the morality of politicians and the preservation of traditional culture. As perceiving collectivist and Confucian contexts positively, these societies have also developed some aspects assimilated from Western democratic contexts. However, the degree to which the students perceive was similar for some civic values but different for some others. Keywords Asian civic values Measurement invariance Latent mean analysis East Asian students
Y. H. Cho (&) The Graduate School of Education, Kyung Hee University, 26 Kyunghee-daero, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul 130-701, South Korea e-mail: [email protected] T. J. Kim Korean Educational Development Institute, Seoul, South Korea e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction In general, three influential factors can explain the development of East Asian societies: historical (e.g., colonialism and East Asian geopolitics), economic (e.g., world trade, foreign capital, the free market, and economic crisis), and cultural (e.g., Asian values against Westernization). These factors must be associated with the base of their civic values (Kennedy 2004). In particular, the tenets of Confucianism have been broadly recognized as a salient aspect that has underpinned the civic values base (Glazer 1997; Vickers 2002). East Asian civic values hold sacred a sense of community or collective entity in which individuals are subject to a greater good, spirituality, and harmony based on Confucian values, morality, and commitment oriented to a common set of values and responsibility toward family and community (Karsten et al. 2002; Lee 2004b; Print 2000). However, East Asian civic values have also undergone a process of hybridization with Western ideas by the indigenization process. Therefore, in a contemporary East Asian civil society, it becomes difficult to distinguish what is Western and what is not (Lee 2004b; Vickers 2002). As East Asia has recently achieved economic growth that rivals the West, there have been attempts to identify distinctive civic values contextually Asian (Huntington 19
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