FEB. 9, 2015
The Chinese government’s latest attempts to tighten controls over the nation’s intellectual discourse have raised concerns. Credit Aly Song/Reuters
BEIJING — They are out there, hiding in library stacks, whispering in lecture halls, armed with dangerous textbooks and subversive pop quizzes: foreign enemies plotting a stealthy academic invasion of Chinese universities.
So says China’s education minister, Yuan Guiren, who has been issuing dire alarms about the threat of foreign ideas on the nation’s college campuses, calling for a ban on textbooks that promote Western values and forbidding criticism of the Communist Party’s leadership in the classroom.
“Young teachers and students are key targets of infiltration by enemy forces,” he wrote on Feb. 2 in the elite party journal “Seeking Truth,” explaining that “some countries,” fearful of China’s rise, “have stepped up infiltration in more discreet and diverse ways.”
Students at Renmin University in Beijing. Education officials have warned against teaching materials that might promote Western values.
But the government’s latest attempts to tighten controls over the nation’s intellectual discourse have raised concerns — and elicited rare open criticism — among teachers and students who reject the idea that foreign pedagogy and textbooks pose a threat to the government’s survival. Indeed, they note, one of the most vocal arguments against such controls came from the education minister himself.
Four years ago, he told a prominent government advisory panel that restricting the use of Western teaching materials was wrongheaded. “No matter how many foreign resources we import, we won’t be at risk, because we’re on Chinese soil,” he said, according to a March 2011 article in the state-run Jinghua Times newspaper.
Referring to the hundreds of thousands of Chinese students who have gone overseas to study, he added, “We even sent so many people abroad and they weren’t affected in the nest of capitalism, so why fear they would be affected here?”
His stark reversal highlights the growing tension between academics and party officials over the future of Chinese scholarship, and has given ammunition to his critics.
“I’m just disappointed that the education minister doesn’t have any backbone, and is simply saying what his superiors want him to say,” said Helen Wu, 25, a graduate student at Shantou University in the southern province of Guangdong.
To gird China’s impressionable young minds, Mr. Yuan has been championing new guidelines, issued last month, that call on the country’s higher education institutions to prioritize the teaching of Marxism, ideological loyalty to the party and the views of President Xi Jinping.
He recently described Chinese schools as the “ideological front line” in a battle against concepts like rule of law, civil society and human rights. Any “wrong talk” in social science and philosophy forums, he said, must be silenced.
His colorful speech, which amplifies the talking points of internal documents that have been circulating over the past two years, appears so far to have had little concrete impact on the nation’s college campuses. Still, some academics expressed concern that such pronouncements would affect the quality of their teaching.
