The educational reform in modern China takes place in a special context of strong impact of foreign ideas and deep-rooted local culture where the importance is attached to the cultivation of Chinese citizens’ civic literacy. The concept of the citizen and its educational form reflect the influence of western educational thought, while the contents of education stick to the features of the Chinese nationality and modern times. Through an analysis of the publications in the Republic China period, it is found that the scheme was permeated with a strong local awareness, and reflected the combination of the native moral consciousness and the modern western civic concept. This not only reflects the particularity of the cultivation of civic literacy in the period of social transformation in modern China, but also is of methodological significance to the localization of citizen education.