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Why China’s Education Crackdown May Be More Than It Seems
By Russell Leigh Moses
[1] College students wait in line to hand in their resumes to get interview opportunities from a company at a job fair held on the campus of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in Shanghai, China.
Associated Press Beijing’s warning last week that professors needed to stop “Western ideas” from subverting China’s universities might look like just another step in a strategy by President Xi Jinping to tighten controls over Chinese society.
[2] But the classroom clampdown has another dimension, involving Xi’s relationship with the conservative left in the Communist party. It suggests Xi’s broader – and laudable – move to refocus politics and policy to better serve the Chinese people is also creating an opportunity for hardliners to push their own agenda.
[3] That ideology is driving some of the smack down of liberal faculty at Chinese universities shouldn’t be surprising. The political playing field in China is dominated these days by conservatives — true-believing hardliners who have been arguing that Xi’s campaign to rejuvenate the Communist party has to be about more control over politics and society, not less.
[4] That same strong-arm approach to reform was on display on Monday, when four party secretaries at major universities in Beijing argued that universities must “resist unhealthy trends [and] build a strong firewall to resist foreign-funded schemes from penetrating classrooms, lectures, forums, salons, and book clubs.”
[5] To prevent that sort of “infiltration,” according to Secretary Han Zhen of the Beijing Foreign Studies University, faculty “should be prepared to be missionaries [and] permeate the thinking of students.” “They shouldn’t blindly rely on the usual methods of direct indoctrination,” Han said, “but instead seek to convey socialist principles as salt or other sort of condiment, necessary and beneficial to one’s health.”
[6] Han’s comrades insisted that universities as a whole needed to “build strong ideological positions, wherein the recruitment and evaluation of teachers’ performance and their promotion should be based on their moral character.” Those are code words for compelling professors to pledge fealty to party doctrine.
[7] China has seen these sorts of campaigns against intellectuals before, including the Anti-Rightist movement on the 1950s and during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. In China these efforts are widely acknowledged as tragedies, with former Premier Wen Jiabao famously invoking the poisonous history of the Cultural Revolution to rebuke the party’s conservative wing two years ago.
[8] So why are China’s conservatives suddenly going after faculty and the values they purportedly bring to the classroom?
[9] The answer isn’t anxiety about unrest at China’s colleges, or even educational reform. The real fear is that another of Xi’s campaigns, the broad and ongoing anticorruption crackdown, is beginning to focus on colleges. That presents conservatives with a threat, and – if they play their cards right – an opportunity.
[10] Some recent Chinese media reports have cited a party document from 2014 vowing to “resolutely curb the spread of corruption, which is causing great harm to colleges and universities”—a clear signal from the state-controlled channels that there’s momentum building within Beijing’s antigraft apparatus to take action.
[11] Party conservatives might be concerned that investigations into how universities and their funds are managed could end up toppling some of their like-minded colleagues. Many party secretaries at major Chinese colleges are Marxist fundamentalists, and they are the real power on campuses. A major antigraft campaign that looks into the way building contracts have been bestowed or subsidies awarded would surely find malfeasance somewhere at or near the top of management there.
[12] That’s one reason why so many college administrators are suddenly hewing to the party hardline. There’s safety in ideology.
[13] At the same time, conservatives are gearing up for the very real possibility that university administrations could be shaken up by the discovery of problems with the awarding of infrastructure projects or student recruitment. The new anti-intellectual campaign gives them political cover to blame the problem on a lack of ideological commitment by professors and the lax enforcement of party doctrine in the classroom.
[14] A major question now is what this says about Xi Jinping’s avowed efforts to remake China’s government to better serve the people.
[15] Upgrading China’s educational model had been one of the laudable goals of Xi’s since he took office, and the first two years of his own tenure saw widespread discussion in the state media about the shortcomings of the current system. But while educational reform is clearly one of the most challenging and closely watched in Chinese society, the government has taken very little sustained action.
[16] Now, Xi seems content to allow political conservatives to resist reform, instead of urging restructuring and reorganizing schools and universities. It may be that he is firmly behind that resistance. Or the shift may just be part of Xi’s decision to achieve party reform through discipline. He may well see the hardline path as politically necessary in this instance, as it has been in others.
[17] At the same time, allowing hardliners to impose their authority on the country’s higher education system is risky to reform as a whole—especially if they decide not to stop there. How students are tested and educated is one of the very few issues in Chinese society that the public gets politically energized about, and even a hint of injustice or inattention kicks off resentment.
[18] Xi’s pledges to remake politics are admirable. But, as with other challenges, it’s difficult to see how much real reform in education can occur when party hardliners seem to have persuaded Xi that the best way for China to leap forward is to step backward.
Russell Leigh Moses is the Dean of Academics and Faculty at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies. He is writing a book on the changing role of power in the Chinese political system.
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