Hitherto, the societal role of the arts and the relevance of arts education has caused significant debates within academia and among the general public. Furthermore, reshaping cultural and educational policy is becoming a shared endeavour across countries (Belfiore, 2008; Brown & Ratzin, 2012; Gilmore & Abigail, 2014). Both the EU and China, have promoted culture and art education in line with the advocacy of UNESCO and the OECD. The aim is to promote cultural and arts education, referring to the importance of cultural diversity, the transmission of knowledge and the potential positive effects on an individual and societal level. In the past twenty years, these two policy contexts have put arts education high on the agenda and encouraged the public to recognise the position of arts education in school, as well as off-campus arts engagements. Although the decisions in relation to cultural and educational policy lie with the EU member states, the EU Parliament and Council cover the goals, recommendations, and various supports for promoting arts education. For instance, the education and training 2020 strategy sets out to enhance innovation and creativity as one of the main objectives. Whilst in China, a series of policies are issued to promote arts education in school curricula(2014; 2015)"Opinions  on Comprehensively Strengthening and improving  aesthetic education in schools from China’s General Offce of  State Council " 2015). The recent Double-Reduction policy, to some extent, encourages the art education market. As a result, art education meets an unprecedented boom, and swiftly, its role within the whole educational system is increasing. Both in the EU and China,  the importance of art education is recognized and emphasised. However, little research takes a comparative perspective between the EU and China to explore the various initiatives, the hidden cultural logic and the political reasons to stimulate culture and arts education. This paper aims to study the differences and commonalities in the ways that the EU and China promote arts education. 

In this paper, the author applies comparative content analysis to investigate the official arts education documents, especially those that focus on the school curricula level. The study started with collecting, sorting, and identifying policy documents on arts education in China and the EU. Afterwards, a selection of representative art education policy documents was subjected to comparative content analysis (Crossley & Watson, 2003). Based on this comparative analysis, this paper aims to explore the similarities and differences between the EU and China. Furthermore, this paper is committed to constructing the understanding of arts education in these two contexts and to exploring the policy plausibility and possible inspiration for other contexts. The comparative analysis focuses on five aspects: guiding ideology, structure, general goal, curriculum content, and implementation strategy.

The findings first demonstrate the background and context in both the EU and China and discuss the political and economic connection between cultural and arts education. The school arts education system in the EU and China contexts was investigated as well. Secondly, the author investigates the explicit objectives and goals of the central Chinese government and the EU Council, and the results indicate that the EU policy focus is on creativity and critical thinking, while the Chinese policy context emphasises moral education and artistic skills improvement. Thirdly, by examining the implicit objectives reflected in various policy documents, the findings discuss the discourse and the ideological framework of China and the EU in promoting arts education, the curricula goals and content indicate the different highlighted social values. In addition, the relevance and importance of analysing official policy documents in relation to the development of arts education are discussed and a number of recommendations are presented.

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