Aligned with the reorientation of the arts and culture in the educational field in the EU and the US(Commission, 2019; Heilig, Cole, & Aguilar, 2010), China’s government has been working on enhancing schools' arts and aesthetic education in recent decades. On 20 December 2023, China's Ministry of Education issued a new educational policy titled ‘Notice on Comprehensive Implementation of School Arts Education Immersion Initiatives’(2023). This policy serves as a further amendment since a series of state-level policy came out in the last decade related to school arts education(2015; 2020; 2014). As stated in this policy, arts education is supposed to foster a mentally and physically wholesome personality in students and to involve arts immersion among students, teachers, and schools(2023). These aspects, to some extent, reflect the ambition of the government to emphasize arts education in school settings. However, there exists a tension between the expectation and the reality as the current reality of arts education remains problematic (e.g., ) in schools(Sun & Fan, 2018; Yu, 2016). There are some studies about policy and practice(Wang & Zhao, 2022; Xu, 2018), especially none of the previous literature examined the gap and the transition process between the policy and its implementations or, in other words, the reality in China’s school practice.

Apart from the ideal concepts and guidelines present in the policy, we consider the artistic textbooks and the national standards as important perspectives to understand and investigate the aims and the practice of school arts education in China. They are official and ‘persuasive texts’, representing a series of dominant knowledge(s) and governmental expectations(Wang, 2019). More importantly, they are directly received by the diverse participants in schools, arguably act as the ‘bridge’ between the institutional assumptions and the practice(Issitt, 2004). In this case, we formed research question: ‘What functions are reflected(framed) in artistic textbooks, and how are they perceived and interpreted by teachers?’ .

In this study, we adopt the critical discourse analysis, specifically, the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA). The content of textbooks is neither static nor value-neutral, it is intertwined with contextual knowledge(s) and with specific educational, political and cultural purposes(Jackson et al., 2023; Wang, 2019) in the other words, textbooks are material-political-social-cultural artefacts(Macgilchrist, 2018). Additionally, the discourse in textbooks is vital and situated in the teaching and learning process involving different actors(Kolbeck & Röhl, 2018). The commonly-used content analysis cannot thoroughly examine the underlying power dynamics, while DHA brings contextual, intertextual, and interdiscursive perspectives to understanding the specific texts and helps to understand the ways in which meaning is stabilized(Barbara Christophe et al., 2018; Reisigl & Wodak, 2015). Given the problem-oriented nature of DHA, we have specified the research questions into several sub-questions: 1)What functions are brought into artistic textbooks? 2)What are the textbook structural and discursive strategies? 3) What are the teacher's perceptions and interpretations of the textbooks? Data selection: In China's secondary schools, the official arts curriculum includes visual arts, music, dance, drama and digital arts, with music and visual arts compulsory in all schools. Despite the variety of textbook editions, two popular ones come to our attention. One is the Fine Art (People's Education Edition,) and the other is the Music (People's Music Publishing House Edition), both of which are used in Xiamen, China, where the interviews are conducted. These two textbook editions are the primary genre in our analysis process, in addition to the selected data: • 2022 China’s National art curriculum standard • Interviews with 3 editors (2 chair editor, and 1editor for renewal version of the fine arts, grade 9) • Interviews with 24 teachers (3 researchers, 13music teachers and 10 Fine art teachers, convenience sampling) Analytical process: First, we organized the data by addressing contextual information. We then conducted the qualitative pilot analysis to select analytical categories, focusing on three dimensions of discourse themes, discursive strategies (i.e., nomination, argumentation, and framing as focal points, especially in this study), and major claims about the functions of arts education in selected texts. This was followed by a detailed case study in the entire section of data, and we did an interdiscursive analysis across different genres. Finally, we formulated the critique and went back to the board economic and political context and discursive practice , then report the results.

The report is formulated to address three research questions. It provides an overview of the primary functions (i.e., aesthetic appreciation, moral and political cultivation, sound personality development, etc.) outlined in the textbooks. This overview is based on an examination of the textbook's objectives and content choices and is aligned with the goals of the national curriculum standards. Notably, there is emphasis on Chinese culture in both editions, reflecting a concerted effort to integrate cultural identity into the educational framework. This cultural emphasis is intertwined with a robust intertextuality among the national standards, the textbooks and policy discourse. Detailed description of discursive strategies contains the claims and assumptions, nominative construction. The ideal-interpretation-implementation loop reveals some autonomy and flexibility of teachers in adapting textbooks to real-world practices and goals, although under certain ideological guidelines. They mentioned the tendency and requirements on emphasizing native and patriotic consciousness, which on the other hand weakens the part of intercultural understanding of art, even the content of the textbook has not been renewed. In relation to the historical context, the political discursive turn in Chinese society promotes the increasing demands for highlighting cultural confidences in terms of the art curriculum. However, there are potential challenges to achieving a balanced and culturally diverse arts education under the state's assumptions.

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