China’s Conservatives Act to Mold Education, Culture

It was a sign of the times. China announced last week that the nation’s universities will soon have some new professors in their midst.

Beginning next month, Communist Party officials responsible for the ideological and political indoctrination of Chinese students will be allowed for the first time to hold the ranks of lecturer, associate professor or even full professor at the nation’s universities.

A new directive from China’s state education commission recommends that there be one instructor in “political and ideological education” for every 150 students. That ratio works out to more than 13,000 faculty members who would be assigned to indoctrinate China’s 2 million college students.

The change is one of many taking place in Chinese society this spring. Four months after former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang was forced to resign, a group of elderly leaders who favor adherence to orthodox, traditional Marxism is exercising widening control over many aspects of Chinese life.

In education, science, literature, the arts and journalism, conservatives within the party have gained the upper hand. They have succeeded in reimposing many of the ideological strictures that had been loosened in China over the last few years and in cooling the climate of intellectual ferment that prevailed.

The People’s Liberation Army has also been playing an increasingly prominent role. On May 1, the army staged the first full-scale military parade in Shanghai since the Communist Revolution of 1949. While hundreds of thousands of Shanghai residents looked on, troops marched in goose-step through the streets, shouting slogans such as “Learn from the masses, salute the muses.”

Those party leaders who advocate far-reaching changes in Chinese society have been forced to yield control over questions of ideology, education and intellectual life in order to preserve the essentials of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform program.

So far, this defensive action has been successful. Although the momentum of China’s market-oriented economic reforms has slowed down this year, the orthodox Marxists have had much less impact upon economic policy than upon cultural and intellectual life.

However, in recent days, Chinese officials have acknowledged that the economic reforms, too, are coming under attack.

Song Tingming, research director for China’s state commission on economic reform, told reporters, “Some people want to expand the campaign (for Marxist orthodoxy) . . . from the political to the economic field.”

In particular, Song said, some people are arguing that by allowing peasants to cultivate their own plots and by urging that Chinese factories be responsible for profits and losses, the regime has opened the way for a return to capitalism. He said these critics, whom he did not name, are also urging greater reliance on the state planning system.

Song’s remarks appeared to be part of a new effort to shore up support for the economic reforms.

The newspaper Economic Daily complained recently in a front-page commentary that “there are some comrades whose minds are conservative, backwards and controlled by stagnating concepts.” When economic changes affect their own interests, the newspaper went on, these people “would rather go back to the old path, thinking that the old is always better than the new.”

Outgrowth of Demonstrations

The recent political changes in China are a direct outgrowth of the nationwide series of student demonstrations last December and early January and the ensuing downfall of Hu as Communist Party secretary. At that time, conservative leaders within the party launched a campaign against what they called the trend toward “bourgeois liberalization” in China.

Most of the leaders of this campaign have been Communist Party officials in their 70s and 80s. Some of them once held positions in the party Politburo or other high-ranking jobs, from which they were ousted when Deng and Hu led a drive to install younger men in leadership positions.

For example, two of the conservative leaders, Wang Zhen, 78, and Song Renqiong, 82, are former military officials who lost their seats in the Politburo in 1985. Another, Deng Liqun, 71, was replaced as the party’s propaganda chief the same year.

These officials have called upon other elderly leaders within the Communist Party to join their campaign.

“At a time when the success of the enterprise of the party and people is at stake, the great mass of old cadres always stand in the front line,” Song said last winter.

Some analysts argue that the old officials are motivated in part by a desire to ensure high-ranking jobs for their own children and political proteges. Hu in particular threatened the party’s old guard by endangering their powers of patronage, these analysts say.

Concern Over Old Values

There seems little doubt, however, that the conservative leaders also sincerely believe that the Communist Party has in recent years been straying too far from the values that it held before and in the years immediately after the 1949 revolution.

This month, many elderly conservative leaders took part in a conference to commemorate the 45th anniversary of Mao Tse-tung’s speech on literature and art at the Communist base camp in Yanan. In that speech, Mao told intellectuals that they must suppress their individual views and feelings in order to serve the cause of the party and revolution.

The Guangming Daily, China’s official newspaper for intellectuals, even published a poem in honor of the occasion. “Our Yanan roads are broad and brilliant,” the poem said. “The older generation stamped them out with their iron feet.”

Out of China’s present population of 1 billion, fewer than a quarter were even alive in 1942. And so these paeans to the good old days of the Yanan generation do not seem to strike any responsive chords among young people in China today.

A propaganda campaign this spring to revive the memory of Lei Feng, the selfless soldier held up two decades ago as a model of virtue for Chinese youth, was greeted with snickers here and was quietly dropped.

Indeed, for those millions of Chinese whose jobs are detached from politics or culture, the Communist Party’s ideological shift has so far had little effect. Visitors traveling through China this spring find ordinary people living, working and shopping much as they did before. Many of them cannot even explain the continuing campaign against “bourgeois liberalization,” much less say how it affects them.

Impact of Marxist Orthodoxy

But the closer one approaches intellectual, cultural or political life, the more it is obvious that China’s return to Marxist orthodoxy has had a serious impact.

In the field of science, for example, the Chinese regime had for the last two years been holding out the promise of academic freedom.

“Truly respecting scientists and engineers means guaranteeing them freedom of academic inquiry and discussion so that they can pursue truth fearlessly,” the Communist Party Central Committee said in 1985.

Now, these assurances are no longer mentioned, and instead, scientists are being told once again that their work should be compatible with Marxism.

“I have often explained to younger scientists the importance of learning and applying Marxist philosophy, but the response has been sluggish,” wrote Qian Xueshen, chairman of the Chinese Assn. for Science and Technology, in the current issue of the journal The Study of Philosophy.

“Perhaps they think that because capitalist countries boast advanced science and technology without having adopted Marxist political forms, then Marxist philosophy is irrelevant to scientific discovery. I will make more efforts to disabuse them of this error,” Qian promised.

Class Analysis Emphasized

In law, Communist Party newspapers are once again emphasizing traditional Marxist class analysis.

“Law is the tool of the ruling class, protects the interests of the ruling class and embodies the will of the ruling class,” said the party newspaper People’s Daily in one recent commentary.

Communist Party propaganda officials are warning writers and artists that their works should not reflect a desire for “total Westernization” but should instead seek to create “socialist literature and art.”

Some newspapers and magazines have been closed, books such as D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” have been banned and journalists are being told not to report too much bad news.

“At present, it is all the more necessary to depict the bright side of things in our country,” He Jingzhi, deputy head of the party propaganda department, declared last month. He said writers should concentrate on “depicting advanced and heroic figures.”

Education Most Affected

The political campaign has been felt most deeply in the field of education.

Last month, China’s state education commission issued new rules that make political and ideological purity a prerequisite for admission to colleges and universities.

“Admission will not be given to any candidate who opposes, either in words or action, the socialist road, the people’s democratic dictatorship, the leading role of the Communist Party and Marxism, Leninism and Mao Tse-tung thought,” the official New China News Agency reported.

In addition, the education commission indicated that the nationwide entrance examinations for universities that have been given in China since 1977, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, will be de-emphasized.

China wants to reduce the “strain” caused by studying for college admissions tests, He Dongchang, vice minister for education, said last month.

Some middle schools now will be allowed to pick students for university admission who have not taken, or have failed, the college admissions tests.

While this new admissions policy is aimed at ensuring ideological conformity, it could also make it easier for students to get into universities by using what the Chinese call “the back door”--that is, the influence of well-connected relatives or friends.

Student Labor Promoted

The state education commission also indicated that it plans to encourage Chinese students to “keep contact with reality” by studying labor techniques while on campus and by doing some “field work” on farms or in factories.

He Dongchang, the vice minister of the education commission, said recently that some of this “field work” will be integrated into regular teaching courses during the school year, and that some may be done over summer or winter vacations “on a voluntary basis.”

Since the beginning of the spring semester in February, Chinese university campuses have remained quiet. Meanwhile, over the past few months, Chinese security officials have been systematically rounding up people considered to be organizers of last December’s student demonstrations for democracy.

At least 20 young people have been arrested so far, according to Chinese news reports, although the actual number may be higher. Generally, Chinese authorities describe these people as workers or jobless youths rather than university students, but the official reports themselves make clear that some of the people involved were campus activists.

On April 29, for example, police in the city of Hangzhou arrested a 20-year-old youth named Chen Weibiao on charges of “engaging in counterrevolutionary agitation.”

Chen was described as a “trainee” at Hangzhou University. “In December, when a small number of college students were making trouble in Hangzhou, (he) tried to pass himself off as a student,” a Hangzhou newspaper reported.

The Chinese account said that Chen had put up eight posters on the Hangzhou University campus “in order viciously to attack the Chinese Communist Party and vilify the socialist system.”

The provincial newspaper said that when police arrested him in his hometown last month, they discovered “three extremely reactionary diaries” in his home.

Some of the arrested demonstrators have been sentenced to jail terms of from three to five years. Chen’s sentence has not yet been announced.