Abstract:

The right to education is a central concept in Chinese education law, yet whether it can shed the label of an imported idea and become a defining concept of the field depends on whether it has attained autonomy. As a legal concept, the right to education is produced through the interaction of value, norm, and fact. If these three dimensions are taken as ideal-typical criteria of identification, the autonomy of the concept can be discerned through the critical events associated with its formation and development. In the late Qing period, the national crisis led the Qing government to treat education as an instrument of national survival, indirectly fostering social acceptance of an egalitarian and broadly inclusive idea of education. After the Chinese Communist Party assumed leadership of the revolution, it regarded the right to education as a right conferred on the people through liberation, thereby turning the individual right to education into a value pursuit of distinctive significance. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the right to education was enshrined in the Constitution as a fundamental right, and China gradually established an education law regime that takes the right to education as both a pivot and an interpretive principle. In this way, the right to education acquired a defining status at the normative level. Thereafter, educational administration and adjudication continuously confirmed, according to law, the institutional facts relating to the right to education, enabling it to become an increasingly defining concept in China’s educational legal practice.

Key words: right to education, iconic concept, educational law, independent knowledge system