[In a stern directive issued last month, the party ordered schools to intensify efforts to promote “Chinese traditional and socialist culture” — a mix of party loyalty and patriotic pride in China’s past. Under this new formulation, the party is presented less as a vanguard of proletarian revolution and more as a force for reviving China and restoring it to its rightful place as a world power.]
By
Javier C. Hernández
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Saluting the flag at a
so-called Red Army school in Beichuan, in the southwestern
province of Sichuan. At China’s
231 Red Army elementary schools, students
learn about the early years of Mao’s
revolution. Credit Fred Dufour/Agence
France-Presse — Getty
Images
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YUQING
COUNTY, China — With the fiery zeal of a
preacher, Xie Hong addressed her class of 50 fourth-grade students, all in
matching red tracksuits.
“Today’s life is rich, blessed, happy and
joyous,” she said. “Where does our happy life come from? Who gave it to us?”
In Ms. Xie’s classroom at the Workers and
Peasants Red Army Elementary School, there was only one correct answer, and she
had worked tirelessly to ensure her students knew it.
“It comes from the blood of revolutionary
martyrs! From the Red Army!” said a 9-year-old boy, Li Jiacheng. The class
burst into applause, and Ms. Xie beamed.
For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has
pushed a stiff regimen of ideological education on students, requiring tedious
lessons on Marx and Mao and canned lectures on the virtues of patriotism and
loyalty. Now, amid fears that the party is losing its grip on young minds,
President Xi Jinping is reshaping political education across China’s more than
283,000 primary and secondary schools for a new era.
Textbooks are getting a larger dose of
Communist Party lore, including glorified tales about the party’s fights
against foreign invaders like Japan. Schools are adding courses on traditional
medicine and Confucian thought to highlight China’s achievements as a
civilization. The government is scaling back discussion of iconoclastic writers
like Lu Xun, amid concerns that exposing students to social criticism may
inspire disobedience.
In a stern directive issued last month, the
party ordered schools to intensify efforts to promote “Chinese traditional and
socialist culture” — a mix of party loyalty and patriotic pride in China’s
past. Under this new formulation, the party is presented less as a vanguard of
proletarian revolution and more as a force for reviving China and restoring it
to its rightful place as a world power.
But the demands have run into opposition, and
even mockery, from some parents and educators, and not just the “tiger moms.”
Many see political indoctrination as an anachronism in an era when China’s more
than 181 million schoolchildren need a modern education in math, science and
liberal arts to get ahead.
They complain that Mr. Xi, who is expected to
strengthen his hold on power at a party meeting this month, is turning public
education into a self-serving propaganda exercise. Some say the president seems
more concerned about defending the party’s legitimacy than educating the
skilled work force that China needs to compete in the global economy.
Such frustrations recently came to a head in
Zhejiang, a wealthy coastal province, where parents protested a decision by
education officials to make traditional Chinese medicine a required course for
fifth-grade students.
Deng Zhiguo, 40, a software programmer who has
two children in primary schools there, said he worried that the changes would
come at the expense of instruction in subjects like biology and chemistry.
“It’s like learning Darwinism in the morning
and creationism in the afternoon,” he said. “How do you expect children to
process that?”
Mr. Xi’s educational campaign has also extended
to universities, where officials have banned textbooks that promote “Western
values” and punished professors for straying from the Communist line. Some
scholars describe restrictions on free speech in the classroom as the most
severe since the aftermath of the massacre around Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Critics say Mr. Xi may be raising the volume in
patriotic education for fear that the party’s message is getting drowned out in
younger generations immersed in social media and the internet. But he faces
significant challenges. A study this year by Chinese and American researchers
found that students appear to be tuning out shrill propaganda. .
The study, based on the results of a 2010
national opinion survey, found that the “incessant ideological indoctrination
by the Chinese government turns out to be counterproductive,” with trust in the
government actually falling among those who received higher levels of
education.
Carl Minzner, an expert in Chinese law and
governance at Fordham University in New York, said the party’s socialist
rhetoric had become “water-cooler banter and fodder for jokes” among educated
Chinese.
“The party of revolution is now the party of
the wealthy and powerful,” he said. “They’ve got to stand for something.
They’re worried about the moral void at the core of Chinese society.”
Mr. Xi has passionately defended his push for
positively portraying China’s past, chastising schools for removing ancient
poems from the curriculum and calling traditional culture “part of the Chinese
nation’s blood and genes.”
This fall, the Chinese Ministry of Education
began rolling out new textbooks in history, language, law and ethics across
primary and secondary schools. The new books include studies of 40
revolutionary heroes, writings by revolutionary leader Mao Zedong like his 1944
speech “Serve the People” and lessons on China’s territorial claims in the
disputed South China Sea, a pillar of Mr. Xi’s foreign policy.
Anti-Japanese sentiment also features
prominently, part of Mr. Xi’s efforts to glorify the early days of the party
and its role in defending China from foreign invaders. A second-grade lesson
tells the story of the “little hero” Wang Erxiao, a 13-year-old cattle herder
who is said to have died in 1942 while trying to protect the offices of a
Communist newspaper from Japanese soldiers.
Experts say the party is seeking ways to
justify its hold on power in an era when its founding goal of proletarian
revolution no longer seems relevant. While Mr. Xi is hardly the first Chinese
leader to turn to patriotism as a substitute, he has pushed a version that
plays up the party’s role as a force for restoring China’s greatness.
“The party’s theories lack vitality and
innovation,” said Zhang Lifan, a historian in Beijing and a frequent critic of
the party, “so the only thing they can do is to try to use the past to seize
the next generation.”
The government has set up 231 so-called Red
Army schools as models for its approach. One is Ms. Xie’s Workers and Peasants
Red Army Elementary School, located in Yuqing County near the site of a former
Communist revolutionary base in Guizhou, a mountainous southern province.
The school’s curriculum recounts the experience
of Mao’s soldiers during the early years of the revolution, who are portrayed
as heroically fighting to free China from rapacious warlords and Japanese
invaders. As at some Red Army schools, students wear military uniforms around
campus; in Ms. Xie’s classroom, that is a privilege reserved for the best
students.
Even math classes are infused with party
history. Students are asked such questions as calculating the distance of the
Long March, Mao’s epic 1934-36 retreat across China. (The answer is about 6,000
miles.)
Teachers tell students that loyalty to the
party can help them overcome personal difficulties and live a meaningful life.
“While other countries are suffering from war
and people are still starving in Africa,” Ms. Xie said during a recent lesson
on perseverance, “please don’t forget the sacrifices made by the Red Army
soldiers.”
Mr. Xi, himself the son of a Communist
revolutionary, has hailed Red Army schools as a model for the nation. He and
his mother, Qi Xin, have given the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars
to the schools, records show. A Red Army school in northwestern China is also
named for Mr. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun.
The party sees the schools, which serve tens of
thousands of students in its former revolutionary bases in 28 provinces, as
charity projects that help the most disadvantaged children.
While the patriotic appeals have found fertile
ground among working-class Chinese hungry for a sense of pride, some experts
warn that placing too much emphasis on nationalistic education has its own
risks.
Jiang Xueqin, an education consultant in
Beijing, said fanning national pride could quickly “mutate into a fierce and
militant nationalism” that is difficult to control.
Mr. Xi’s vision of patriotic education is
already in full bloom at the Workers and Peasants Red Army Elementary School,
which was founded in 1788 but only became a Red Army school in 2012.
Classes begin with Red Army songs, and students
take turns reciting revolutionary stories featuring Japanese spies as villains.
“The blood in the past gave us the life we have
today,” said Kuang Yanli, 11, a sixth-grade student. “A lot of other countries
want to invade our country again, so we have to study hard and make sure that
doesn’t happen.”
Local officials are sensitive to the idea that
the school is indoctrinating students, and the police blocked journalists from
The New York Times from reporting after being alerted to their presence.
Mr. Xi himself has also become a part of the
curriculum. Several times a week, the school’s more than 1,400 students line up
in the cement-paved courtyard to sing an ode to Mr. Xi’s signature phrase, the
“Chinese dream”:
Chinese dream for 1,000 years,
Chinese dream for 100 years,
The dream carries on, the dream embraces all,
For the revival of China, for the revival of
China!
Iris Zhao contributed research.
Follow Javier C. Hernández on Twitter:
@HernandezJavier.
