On a frost-bright morning at Shenyang Taoxian airport, a schoolgirl held a medal that had belonged to her great-great-grandfather, a veteran of the Korean War, as a Y-20 transport escorted by J-20 fighters descended with a water salute. The aircraft carried the remains of Chinese volunteers whose bodies had lain for decades on the Korean peninsula; the military ceremony, the flag-draped coffins and the strains of a commemorative march turned an abstract chapter of history into a tactile lesson for children watching from the tarmac.
Teachers and school leaders across Liaoning province are deliberately turning those ceremonies into classroom material. Schools from border-city Dandong to downtown Shenyang are building museum clusters, curating family artifacts and staging field lessons at memorials on the Yalu River, seeking to stitch national history, civic duty and emotional experience into a coherent civic education for primary and secondary pupils.
The educational methods blend intimate family narratives with public ritual. A pupil’s handling of a dented medal is presented not simply as private remembrance but as a bridge linking a household memory to a national story; school exhibitions echo that linkage with photographs, relics and student narrators who are coached to recount episodes of sacrifice and duty in plain, reverent terms.
At Dandong’s riverfront, class time literally moves outdoors. Teachers take students to the “national gate” on the Yalu, treating the border as an open-air classroom where the landscape, rusted bridge scars and nearby memorial towers are read as evidence of historical struggle and as prompts for lessons in responsibility and patriotic duty.
These practices sit within a wider political and pedagogical context. Since the 2010s China’s education authorities have emphasised so-called “red education” to foster national cohesion and party legitimacy, and the ritual return of remains offers a particularly emotional vehicle for that work. Using official ceremonies, local museums and youth organisations to channel feelings about the past is a low-cost, high-impact way to shape generational attitudes toward the state and the military.
There are pragmatic reasons educators favour such immersive approaches. The emotional immediacy of a returned relic or a public repatriation ceremony can cut through historical abstraction and produce lasting impressions on young minds in a way that textbooks often cannot. For communities in border regions, the narratives also buttress a sense of vigilance and custodial duty toward national territory at a time of heightened regional uncertainty.
Internationally, these scenes are ambiguous signals. For domestic audiences they humanise history and reinforce social solidarity; for outside observers they underscore Beijing’s ongoing investment in historical memory as a tool of governance. Whether one reads this as a benign civic ritual or as a deliberate instrument of state socialisation depends on political perspective, but the trend is clear: Chinese authorities and local educators are intensifying efforts to convert historical commemoration into concrete civic formation.