In China, is there a difference between education and CCP propaganda?
There must be if it’s possible there to learn how to make and build and run things that cannot be made and built and run with party slogans alone. To make a bridge, you need to know about physics and engineering. You need decking and girders. You need cranes and lifts. You need supervision and labor. You do not not Xi Jinping Thought or Mao Zedong Thought.
Is it possible to learn and do things in China without also being constantly bombarded by CCP propaganda?
If there’s any sliver of daylight between education and political programming or between work and political programming in today’s China, the Chinese Communist Party is working hard to close the gap. More and more Chinese are being forced to mull Xi Jinping Thought as part of their regular duties. And “China’s ruling party takes direct control of country’s universities,” reports Gu Ting for Radio Free Asia Mandarin (January 18, 2024):
Presidents’ offices are being merged with embedded party committees to form a ‘unified’ leadership for higher education….
While the ruling party already has branches and committees embedded in universities and other academic institutions, commentators said it has never actually merged itself with administrative structures before, not even during the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.
The party committee at Beijing’s Tsinghua University issued a notice on Jan. 14 announcing that its office had merged with the office of the university president to form a new Party Committee Office that would run the school….
Similar changes have been afoot in major universities across China, including Shanghai Jiaotong University, Southwest Jiaotong University, Sichuan University and Nanjing University, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Harbin Engineering University, Nanjing University of Science and Technology and Fuzhou University, among others, according to a review of their official websites by RFA Mandarin.
Journalist Gao Yu told RFA that she “didn’t expect that they would merge like this, turning two brands into one, under the unified leadership of the party. Now, the whole university must respond to education by the party and integrate politics into the core curriculum. It’s the first time this has happened since the founding of the People’s Republic of China.”
Meanwhile, China’s minister of education, Huai Jinpeng, proclaims that the CCP must “accelerate the high-level opening up of education to the outside world, effectively participate in global education governance, and make full use of various platforms and stages to break new paths and create new space in the new international situation.”
These words almost don’t mean anything. But when you scrape away the gunk, what they’re saying is that the Chinese Communist Party must not only harangue and brainscrub its own people every day in every way but also the people of the whole world. Which is like urging an avalanche to keep tumbling. Had Huai said the opposite—that the CCP must learn to keep its mouth shut and leave people alone to study and think and act independently and in peace—he would have demonstrated true leadership. But then he’d be in prison or dead.
