Tom Phillips: China's universities must become Communist party 'strongholds', says Xi Jinping
Chinese authorities
must intensify ideological controls on academia and turn universities into
Communist party “strongholds”, President Xi Jinping has
declared in a major address. “Higher education ... must adhere to correct
political orientation,” Xi said in a high-profile speech to top party leaders
and university chiefs that was delivered at a two-day congress on “ideological
and political work” in Beijing. Universities must be transformed into
“strongholds that adhere to party leadership” and political education should be
made “more appealing”, the president ordered, according
to Xinhua, China’s official news agency. Experts have described it as the
latest phase of Beijing’s bid to rein in opposition to its rule.
Read about the scholars and intellectuals expelled from the USSR in 1922
Xi, a populist
strongman who recently reaffirmed his political authority by being
declared the party’s “core leader”, said teachers needed to be both
“disseminators of advanced ideology” and “staunch supporters of [party]
governance”. Echoing a
1932 speech by Joseph Stalin the Chinese president told his audience
teachers were “engineers
of the human soul” whose “sacred mission” was to help students
“improve in ideological quality, political awareness, moral characteristics and
humanistic quality”. “Party authorities should increase their contact with
intellectuals in colleges, befriend them and sincerely listen to their opinions,”
Xi added, pointing out that the party’s education policies “must be fully
carried out”.
Carl Minzner, an
expert in Chinese law and politics from Fordham University in New York, said
Xi’s speech appeared to signal the next phase of a decade-long campaign to
wrest back control of areas it feared were “getting out of control” such as the
media, public interest law and academia. “What you are seeing is a reassertion of
ideological control because they feel that colleges and schools are the hotbeds
for ideas that potentially could be problematic; ideas of constitutionalism,
ideas of liberalism. This is an effort to figure out, ‘How do we get a tighter
control over that?’ and it looks like this is definitely going to be rolling
through all of China’s colleges over the next couple of years. This is a big
deal.”
Universities have been
coming under increasing pressure since 2014, when a party-run newspaper sent
its reporters into classrooms and accused
Chinese academics of not giving enough support to the country’s political
system. “The atmosphere in higher
education has been getting progressively colder over the last couple of years …
I think people have already begun getting the message: ‘You need to watch
yourself,’” said Minzner. “[But] this is a signal that things are about to go
to the next level.” The American scholar
predicted the brunt of Xi’s ideological offensive would be felt by social
science departments. The result would be growing self-censorship, the avoidance
of politically sensitive research topics and a proliferation of academic
studies into the speeches and policies of Xi, who became China’s top leader in
November 2012. But the moves could also affect international schools in China,
which have been facing growing
scrutiny as part of a push to counter the propagation of western ideas, and
the flow of Chinese students to higher education institutions in countries such
as the US and Britain.
“I think that you
might start to see Chinese officials begin to think that this is not such a
good thing, and begin to decide that it is less desirable and to begin to
discourage that in certain ways,” Minzner said. “There is a fundamental contradiction
between [the expansion of international education] and the current direction in
which the party is going.”
Qiao Mu, an outspoken
professor from Beijing Foreign Studies University, questioned whether Xi’s
commands would have a “real impact” on campus life but said they were likely to
influence Communist party officials working in universities. Qiao, one
of the victims of the crackdown on academia, said Chinese students had long
had “socialist values” drilled into them by teachers. “They’re already used to
it.” These days, however, the greatest influence on China’s youth was not
socialism but social media, the scholar added.
see also
Ian Johnson
- Inside and Outside the System: Chinese Writer Hu Fayun // China’s Invisible
History: An Interview with Filmmaker and Artist Hu Jie
Tom
Phillips - Beijing shuts down art exhibition on violence against women
The Crises of Party Culture: by Yang Guang
The Crises of Party Culture: by Yang Guang
China:
Writing out the non-Han
China - The old regime and the revolution
My first visit to Gandhiji: Tan Yun-Shan (including Gandhi's first letter to China)
China - The old regime and the revolution
My first visit to Gandhiji: Tan Yun-Shan (including Gandhi's first letter to China)
