2015-01-30
Chinese parents wait at the entrance of a middle school during the National College Entrance Exam in central Kaifeng city, June 7, 2012.
Imaginechina
China’s education minister on Friday ordered the country’s colleges and universities to ban textbooks that promote “western values,” a phrase that often refers to democracy and human rights.
Yuan Guiren told a higher education forum that Chinese institutions should take steps to protect their “political integrity,” and “never let textbooks promoting western values appear in our classes,” official media reported.
Yuan said colleges and universities should step up “ideological management, especially of textbooks, teaching materials and class lectures,” the official Xinhua news agency reported.
In particular, textbooks and materials taken direct from western sources should be further controlled, he said.
Yuan also said higher education institutions should ban any negative comments about the ruling Communist Party from its classrooms.
“Remarks that slander the leadership of the Communist Party of China, smear socialism or violate the country’s Constitution and laws must never appear or be promoted in college classrooms,” Xinhua quoted him as saying.
He warned teachers and lecturers not to grumble or express discontent in front of their students.
Xinhua cited the case of Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, who was handed a life jail term for separatism in September after the authorities accused him of “spreading separatist thoughts” among his students, charges which Tohti has repeatedly denied.
‘Western’ cultural imports
Yuan’s comments come as China steps up a nationwide campaign to reject what officials describe as “western” cultural imports, including celebrating Christmas.
But a university professor who asked to remain anonymous said Yuan’s comments were “nonsense” and harked back to the Mao era when China was shut off from the rest of the world.
“This is the same as the closed door policy,” the professor said. “For the education minister to be saying such things is deeply embarrassing.”
She added: “If we’re going to reject all western ideologies, Marxism…much of modern science and even university education itself came from the West.”
“According to Yuan Guiren, we should abolish universities, including the education ministry, and run private schools for the study of classical Chinese texts,” she said.
“As we’re traveling back 2,000 or 3,000 years, we could bring back foot-binding and speak in archaic Chinese.”
