In law school at Peking University in the late 1970s, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) was an avid student of English and helped translate texts that gave his generation its first, exhilarating exposure to Western legal ideals after the death of Mao Zedong (毛澤東).
However, today Li’s work might be considered dabbling in subversion.
This week, China’s ideological drive against Western liberal ideas broadened to take in a new target: foreign textbooks.
Meeting in Beijing with the leaders of several prominent universities, Chinese Minister of Education Yuan Guiren (袁貴仁) laid out new rules restricting the use of Western textbooks and banning those sowing “Western values.”
“Strengthen management of the use of original Western teaching materials,” Yuan told the university officials, according to state news agency Xinhua. “By no means allow teaching materials that disseminate Western values in our classrooms.”
The strictures on textbooks are the latest measures to strengthen the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) control of intellectual life and eradicate avenues for spreading ideas about liberal democracy and civil society that it regards as dangerous to its hold on power.
On Jan. 19, the leadership issued guidelines demanding that universities make a priority of ideological loyalty to the party, Marxism and the ideas of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
Yuan’s message this week explained how universities should do that.
“Never allow statements that attack and slander party leaders and malign socialism to be heard in classrooms,” he said, according to the Xinhua report. “Never allow teachers to grumble and vent in the classroom, passing on their unhealthy emotions to students.”
The CCP has repeatedly sought to reinforce ideological influence over education, especially since 1989, when then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) used armed soldiers to suppress pro-democracy student protests centered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
However, many liberal intellectuals said Xi has elevated fear of Western subversion to a new extreme, and the scrutiny of textbooks reflects that fear.
“Higher education has been designated as a major battleground of ideological struggle,” said Zhang Xuezhong (張雪忠), a lawyer in Shanghai who was banned from teaching in 2013 because he was deemed to be spreading dangerous ideas, in a telephone interview.
“This won’t be the final step; there’ll be more to come,” Zhang added.
However, he said Chinese society was so diverse and exposed to outside information, even with censorship, that enforcing Marxist purity was nearly impossible.
“As for the effectiveness, and whether every university and college will enforce the demands as required, that’s a totally different matter,” Zhang said.
Just how the ministry’s demands regarding foreign textbooks will play out remains unclear.
In many Chinese universities, English-language textbooks and translations of them have become widely used in the natural sciences, economics, law, journalism and the social sciences.
Many students aspiring to study or work abroad believe mastering foreign works is essential to their success.
The publishing house of Tsinghua University in Beijing has reprinted a series of journalism textbooks in their original English, including News Reporting and Writing by Melvin Mencher.
The publishing houses of Peking University and Renmin University, also in Beijing, have printed a series of foreign textbooks for the humanities, business and law.
“We use foreign textbooks, but when the teacher is lecturing, they’ll add a Chinese spin,” Peking University economics professor Zhou Jianbo (周建波) said in an interview.
“If you want to change this, it’ll take a huge amount of effort,” he said. “Much of that literature is from abroad — about foreign problems and how foreigners approach them, because the work from abroad is still ahead of us.”
While the party is unlikely to entirely ban such books, its determination to cleanse schools of politically troublesome ideas seems unstoppable.
At the same meeting at which Yuan laid down his demands, university officials lined up to endorse the ideological clampdown.
“Propaganda and ideological work in higher education must make instruction in ideals and convictions its primary task,” Peking University CCP secretary Zhu Shanlu (朱善璐) said at the meeting, according to China Education News, a government Web site.
Paradoxically, this intellectual offensive is being brought by a generation of party leaders who came to adulthood during the traumatic years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and in the first burst of liberalizing intellectual and political ferment that followed.
As a law student, Li, the premier, translated The Due Process of Law, by Alfred Denning, an influential English judge.
Li also helped compile Western legal materials used in the Peking University law school when it became permissible to study such ideas.
“In legal studies, in fact, the mainstream of thinking emerges from Western theories and traditions,” He Weifang (賀衛方), a law professor at Peking University whose liberal views have made him a target of hardline criticism, said in telephone interview. “We should convene a conference to study how Premier Li Keqiang disseminated Western legal theories.”
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