Chinese schoolchildren learn the world according to Xi Jinping

Beijing has revealed the biggest step up in China’s patriotic education campaign since the fallout from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Chinese President Xi Jinping last month during the celebration marking the 100th founding anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. Picture: Reuters

Chinese primary school students will soon have “seeds of loving” the Chinese Communist Party planted in their “young hearts” as Beijing enlists them in a sweeping campaign in “Xi Jinping Thought”.

After having their summer ­holidays ruined by an outbreak of the Delta variant of Covid-19, ­students as young as eight will from next week be made to learn “golden quotes” by President Xi.

China’s education ministry late on Tuesday unveiled the guidelines ahead of the new school year, which starts next Wednesday.
  They mark the biggest step up in the country’s patriotic education system since the fallout from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

“The document is incredibly creepy,” said Geremie Barme, a historian of China and a fellow with the Centre on US-China ­Relations at the Asia Society in New York.

The Communist Party has long used patriotic education to shore up its support, but the focus on Mr Xi marks a change.

Not since the era of Mao Zedong – which ended with his death in 1976 – has China’s ideological instruction focused so much on the country’s leader.

Mr Xi has for years spoken of the need to more firmly shape Chinese minds while they are young. “We must implement a ­national action plan led by party cadres that starts with the family and gets hold of children when they are still infants,” he said in 2017, the year his political ideology was made ­official Communist Party dogma.

“‘Grab them in the cot’ is my translation,” said Professor Barme, an emeritus professor at the Australian National University.

From next week primary school students will learn with “vivid, concrete, visual and intuitive methods” that the party is “the backbone of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation” and that “General Secretary Xi Jinping is the leader of the entire party and all people in the country”.

“The primary school stage ­focuses on enlightenment and guidance, planting seeds of loving the party, the country and socialism in their young hearts,” said China’s National Textbook Committee.

Beijing’s new instructions will formalise the Xi leadership cult across the entire Chinese education system.

The committee said junior high students must learn “specific facts” to illustrate the party’s “two miracles” of development to help them understand “the core ­essence of Xi Jinping’s new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

Chinese high school students must “grasp the essence of Xi ­Jinping’s thoughts on socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era”, teaching them the “lofty ideal of communism” and its ­refinement in Xi’s China.

University students – many of them aspiring party members – are to be taught “the theoretical system, internal logic, spiritual ­essence and significance of Xi ­Jinping’s thoughts on socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era”.

Postgraduate students are to use the core elements of Mr Xi’s thoughts on socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era to “focus on the future” and better devote themselves to the “great cause of national rejuvenation”.

The education ministry’s guidelines also instruct academics working in every field to use Mr Xi’s wisdom.

Courses in philosophy, social science, economics, law, sociology, education, military science, agronomy, history, literature and art should be “integrated into the relevant content of Xi Jinping’s new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

Yun Jiang, a researcher at the Australian National University, said China’s then leader Jiang Zemin was not part of the lessons at her primary school in Shanghai in the 1990s.

“We were taught things like, why is the Chinese flag red, said Ms Jiang, managing editor of the China Story blog at ANU.

“The answer is: it is stained by the blood of revolutionary ­heroes.”

She said back then her classmates did not take the lessons very seriously.

One Beijing businessman, whose son is in the fifth grade, said the new curriculum demonstrated how entrenched Xi’s “personality cult” is in China.

“It can’t last long,” he said.

Professor Barme, who has written about the long history of the party’s patriotic campaigns in his online journal, China Heritage, said the wide ranging instructions had been building up since before Mr Xi took power.

“It’s really suffocating,” he told The Australian.

“It’s part and parcel of this ­attack on unruly entrepreneurs, on individualism, on celebrity culture and all the other outcrops of modern bourgeois life.”