Military, Political Study Ordered for Beijing Students

All of next term’s new students at Beijing University, a hotbed of recent unrest, will be sent to army academies for a year of military and political training, a university official said Monday.

Huang Weicheng, head of the president’s office, said October’s intake of first-year students will also be cut to 800 from the more than 2,000 originally planned.

“The students will go through military and political training. They--men and women--will learn basic culture and military affairs,” he said. The state education commission, not the university, made the decision, he added.

The expensive move means that undergraduates will need five instead of four years to complete their studies.

Diplomats said Beijing University, China’s most prestigious, was being singled out after playing a leading role in months of pro-democracy protests that swept the country until the army crushed the movement with heavy loss of life in June.

Most-Wanted List

Wang Dan, a 24-year-old history student at the university, tops the police list of 21 most-wanted student leaders. He is believed to have been captured last month, but the authorities have not released any information about his fate.

“The academies will be able to supervise and watch the students closely,” a diplomat commented.

Chinese universities have sometimes in the past sent students to military academies but usually for short periods.

Last week, officials said this year’s graduates will have to work for one to two years before they can begin postgraduate studies.

“We want to guide students so that they become close to the workers and peasants,” Deputy Education Minister He Dongchang was quoted as saying in the party’s People’s Daily newspaper.

“During the unrest and counterrevolutionary turmoil, we painfully saw how students had gone farther and farther along the road of bourgeois liberalism,” he added.

Also on Monday, the families of the U.S. Embassy staff in Beijing returned to China. About 260 dependents were evacuated in June after shots were fired by Chinese troops into the U.S. diplomatic compound.

A group of 40 dependents arrived on a flight from the United States via Tokyo. They were greeted by Ambassador James R. Lilley.