Armed with interactive online courses, generous funding and new dedicated research institutes, China’s universities are on the frontlines of an effort to promote Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) thinking to China and the world.
Since October, many universities across China have placed “Xi Jinping Thought” at the core of their curricula — the first time since the era of Mao Zedong (毛澤東) that a Chinese leader has been accorded similar academic stature.
Mandatory ideology classes have been updated by the universities in response to instruction from the leadership that Xi’s ideas must enter the textbooks, classrooms and minds of students.
Photo: AFP
For Hu Angang (胡鞍鋼), an economics professor at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University and an expert in the field of “Chinese exceptionalism,” the emergence of a leader like China has been a long time coming.
Hu has for decades argued that China’s unique political system would eventually guide the country to become a superpower on par with the US.
Now he is among a growing number of thinkers studying what is officially known as “Xi Jinping Thought for Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” and disseminating it to students and officials.
“Xi’s proposals are all beneficial for the world, they are incomparable,” Hu said in his office on the Tsinghua campus in the city’s Haidian District. “China has entered a new era and is beginning to provide public goods to the world, just as I said it would 10 years ago.”
The mobilization by the universities, aside from securing support for Xi, is an attempt to return Chinese Communist Party ideology to pride of place in a society that has grown politically apathetic during decades of rapid economic growth, experts of Chinese politics said.
Xi wants the party’s values to be better accepted by the public so as to foster additional legitimacy, said Michael Gow, an expert on Chinese higher education at Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou.
“The difference under Xi is that he is trying to expand the values of the state so that they appeal and resonate more with people that the state wants to exert dominance over,” he said.
The push to reinvigorate acceptance of party ideology comes as the Chinese National People’s Congress in March scrapped term limits for the presidency, clearing the way for Xi to rule for life, a decision that sparked widespread unease.
“Xi Thought,” which is literally a collection of Xi’s public statements, is an all-encompassing guide for China’s professed aims of becoming an economic and military power by 2050, under the strict control of the ruling Communist Party.
A decade ago, Hu would teach his students about the work of the World Bank as a gold standard for development, he said.
However, “from 2015 I began to change my classes, because China was now in front and the world was behind,” said Hu, a prominent public intellectual in China, who wears a watch on each wrist and grows animated when speaking of his favorite subject.
Personal support for Xi is nothing new, but the ideology drive goes further by attempting to build support for his ideas and leadership among officials and in elite institutions.
Not everyone shares Hu’s passion, however.
An undergraduate economics student at a university in Beijing with a Xi Thought institute said that political discussions still lacked any real link to people’s lives.
Xi Thought is all about slogans and targets, the student said, declining to be identified.
“The concepts are not objectively worked out at all, which is to say the ideas don’t have internal logic,” the student said.
Since October, at least 30 Xi Thought research institutes have been established in universities, governments and ministries, while lecture courses for students, officials and ordinary people have been organized across the country.
Beijing’s Xi Thought institute has a budget of 16 million yuan (US$2.46 million) for this year, according to the Beijing Federation of Social Sciences.
Researchers who apply for funding through the center can get between 80,000 and 300,000 yuan for projects.
The most prestigious annual grants in China, the National Social Sciences Fund, in June announced that funding for this year was awarded to 90 research projects with Xi’s name in the title, 240 projects on the “new era,” a signature Xi slogan, and dozens more on other Xi Thought-related policy initiatives.
Xi’s fusing of nationalism and traditional Chinese values has wider appeal today than Mao’s or Karl Marx’s ideas, which have been part of mandatory “patriotic” education, Gavekal Dragonomics China policy analyst Xie Yanmei (謝妍梅) said.
“Classes on Marxism and Mao might not create true believers, but they create the sense that in order to get ahead you have to speak the language, you have to participate in the shared make-believe,” she said.
However, there are elements of Xi Thought that do have real appeal for some students, she said.
“The sense of a Chinese nation being led by Chinese values towards a great rejuvenation is, I think, working,” Xie said.
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