Nation, Curriculum, and Identity: School Music Education as Cultural Governance in China and Malaysia

This article examines school music curriculum as a technology of cultural governance in China and Malaysia, analyzing how compulsory education policy shapes the discursive construction of cultural identity in multi-ethnic postcolonial states. Rather than treating curriculum as a neutral conduit for knowledge transmission, the study theorizes music education as a governmental apparatus through which states produce particular forms of cultural citizenship. Drawing on thematic synthesis of 23 peer-reviewed studies—identified through systematic searches in Web of Science, Scopus, CNKI, and ERIC—this comparative analysis interrogates four dimensions: governance structures, curriculum content, pedagogical negotiations, and identity discourse. The Chinese system deploys centralized aesthetic education emphasizing traditional music within a unified nationality framework, with 64 percent of approved K–12 textbook repertoire comprising Chinese compositions. The Malaysian system navigates multicultural imperatives through parallel vernacular school structures that simultaneously enable ethnic cultural preservation and reinforce communal segmentation. Both cases reveal a shared Inter-Asian anxiety: the postcolonial imperative to construct authentic national culture while managing the contradictions of ethnic diversity. The study identifies persistent gaps between policy discourse and classroom practice, suggesting that cultural governance through curriculum remains fundamentally contested terrain. This analysis problematizes rather than resolves the question of whether music education can serve both national integration and cultural pluralism, arguing that this tension constitutes the defining problematic of postcolonial music pedagogy in Asia.