Epistemological flashpoints in China’s ‘person-making’ education with reinvoked cultural discourses: <i>lideshuren</i> as an example

Abstract As an imprint and reinvigoration of Confucian culture, China foregrounds its 21st-century state-run education as to make national(istic) citizens, reinvoking lideshuren (establishing personhood by cultivating moral excellence) as its signature discourse beyond Western frameworks. Drawing upon Foucault’s thinking, this article untangles China’s effort as being epistemologically vexed in three steps. First, I pick up Foucault’s interpellation on language, discourse, and episteme, evoking a possible language-episteme conflation and/or rupture which is crucial to understanding China’s lideshuren knowledge (re)production and translation within and across cultures. Second, I trace lideshuren to a Confucian prototype to make visible its possible historical–cultural murmurings along a correlative relationality episteme. This historical detour enables me to better problematize, in the third section, contemporary China’s remobilizing, transforming, and reinterpreting Confucian lideshuren discourses to both the Chinese and Western wor(l)d along a delimiting modern ‘trap of philology’. This historical–present epistemological comparison, albeit reductive, feeds into my analysis of China’s making of universal–national(istic) citizens at the nexus of nationalism and globalism. By focusing on China, this article provides implications for comparing national educations as making universal individuals in a globalized age.