by Lenora Chu
Song’s WeChat profile photo showed her sitting on a ledge with the ocean undulating behind her. A little girl perched on her lap; she looked to be about eleven years old. Like me, Teacher Song was the mother of a child in China, forced to navigate the system. We were both trying to find the best way forward.
On the day of the preparedness seminar, I filed into the assembly hall alongside 150 other parents. Onstage were three mothers whose children had graduated from Soong Qing Ling into higher levels of schooling. The mothers were dressed formally and seated before microphones, and it was the second speaker who resonated most with the audience of anxious parents.
“With the more and more flat world, our kids should not only have a good mastery of Chinese, math, and English but also art and philosophy,” she told the group of parents. Mother of three children, the woman clearly had the money or connections needed to skirt the one-child policy, either by giving birth overseas or by paying fines.
“We all need a blueprint, a rough draft of your children’s development plan. What’s the potential secondary school after primary school? Or should they go abroad? Or is it better to finish bachelor’s at Fudan, Jiaotong, or Peking University?” she asked, naming the country’s elite universities, “then pursue master’s degrees abroad?”
Some parents scribbled notes, while others trained video cameras on the “preparedness gurus.”
“We’re all on this path,” the speaker was saying, “not only for our children but also our children’s children. That’s how important our decisions will be.” She spoke of a television series from nineteen years ago called Yongzheng Dynasty. “I’ll never forget when Emperor Yongzheng said, ‘Don’t merely choose the new emperor; also take into account the next heir, and the next one.’”
The parents—all with toddlers in the classrooms just down the hall—nodded as they thought of the futures of their unborn children and grandchildren. Murmuring agreement rippled through the crowd.
In this room, I thought, glancing around at the nodding heads of Soong Qing Ling parents, were 150 reasons reform would not be coming quickly to Chinese education. The forces of culture and a test-based system were too strong to ignore.
I would soon discover a new reason that change was slow to come. For an independent thinker raised inside a democracy, it was the most unsettling of all.
7
Little Soldier
The school curriculum is being used as a “means of political indoctrination for the purpose of ruling the people, rather than for the development of the individual person.”
—Li Maosen, moral education scholar
One night, Rainey had an announcement for me.
“I like China better than America,” he said, in his singsongy voice.
“What, Rainey?” I asked, startled. We’d never really talked about the concept of country, nor had we ever discussed nationality or ethnicity.
To explain, I would have to have said: “Rainey, my ancestors are from China, and your father’s are from Germany, Norway, and Sweden. Your father is as white as they come, but in an odd twist, he lived in China as a Peace Corps volunteer long before your mother ever stepped foot in her ancestral motherland. Racially, you’re exactly half of each of your dad and mom—Caucasian and Chinese—but your nationality is American. Oh, by the way, all your classmates are Chinese nationals.”
It was complicated. I glanced over at Rainey and tendered a question. “Why do you like China better than America?” I asked.
Was Rainey repeating something he’d heard at school? Had someone planted this idea in his head? And what about that time back in the States, under a classic barbecue-and-summer blue sky, when America had won?
Rainey lifted his shoulders in a four-year-old shrug.
* * *
At the front of most classrooms in China sits a framed flag of the People’s Republic of China. Bright red to signify the Communist revolution, the Chinese flag boasts a large yellow star, as stand-in for the Communist Party, and four smaller stars arranged in orbit—the people under its rule.
The Chinese schoolroom flag is nothing like the American version I remember; the Stars and Stripes hangs from a pole within a child’s reach, its fabric rippling whenever the classroom door sends a gust of air its way. You can touch it, wipe your grape-jam-smeared mouth on it—not that your teacher would be happy about this—or even burn it if you so desire, with your right to do so protected by the United States Constitution. By contrast, it’s a crime to desecrate the Chinese flag, punishable by prison time. In the schoolroom, the Chinese flag is affixed behind a pane of glass, encased in wood, and hung high above the students’ heads, a fitting metaphor for education in China: Always heed the higher authority. Mounted north of the chalkboard, and hovering over every schoolteacher in China, is this daily visual reminder of the true purpose of Chinese education.
Chinese schools teach math and science, yes, but they are also charged with a singular objective: shaping students into proper citizens of their country.
Much is required of the mind of the Chinese citizen. He must love country (China), his people (the Chinese), labor (working for China), scientific knowledge (the key to China’s economic future), and socialism (the Chinese market model). These “five loves” are embedded in the national curriculum and appear in textbooks from primary school all the way through college, and they are the pillars of the Party’s campaign to shape the worldview of the people.
It’s patriotism as a governing technique, a practice as old as China’s history itself. Indeed, you could say that China’s leadership has had thousands of years of practice tightening its grip on the hearts and minds of its people. Confucius himself believed that government by ideology was “more important and effective than government by law,” wrote moral education scholar Li Maosen. Confucius said: “He who rules by moral forces is like the pole-star, which remains in its place while the other stars surround it.”
In other words, why use guns or force when leaders instead could cultivate an internal, self-governing compass in every person under your rule? I thought again about those families who stared upward at the Champion List; years of backbreaking study were required to advance into the imperial court. Yong Zhao, a scholar famously disdainful of China’s education system, said the exam system served a convenient purpose for the leaders who perpetuated it: Keeping the best and brightest young men memorizing texts most hours of the day, “their minds . . . steeped in Confucian philosophy, which forbade them to have any unorthodox thoughts.” Lots of time devoted to study meant little time to organize rebellions, making exams a handy tool for governing a large mass of land carved up into, at times, warring factions.
The Party’s approach to education today is little different. In 1949, the Communists took the helm of a country ravaged by war, with vast gaps in welfare from village to village and region to region. It inherited a school system that was in tatters. Slotting patriotism into the school curriculum was a neat trick: It brought together a widely divergent population, since the schools the Party was charged with uniting were as disparate as the work-unit schools of Mao’s Communists, the institutions of the departed Kuomintang, and classrooms inside orphanages governed by provinces.
In the early years of Communist rule, schoolteachers were directly responsible for disseminating Party policy. The first primary school textbook created under Mao sang the man’s praises: “Chairman Mao is like the sun; he shines even brighter than the sun . . . we will follow you forever.” A 1950s textbook passage reminded students whom to thank for progress:
My grandpa herded sheep when he was six; my father fled famine when he was six. This year I turn six, and I am in school due to the Communist Party’s help.
The state’s propaganda department was nothing if not opportunistic, and it was bold with its machinations. Depending on the era, it tapped certain themes over others, including Marxism as dominant ideology, China’s humiliation at the hands of Japanese aggressors, or the importance of a
socialist market economy. In 2017, the Party announced that all textbooks would be rewritten to move up the start of the Japanese war by six years. By lengthening the Sino-Japanese conflict to fourteen years and pegging its start to imperial Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria, the move was expected to incite patriotism (and even more wariness of the Japanese). Just like that—history was recast.
As China opened up to the world, the Party’s target morphed, as if leaders suddenly realized it couldn’t realistically cultivate one billion Communists. Instead, they reasoned that a strong national identity would instill a loyalty to the homeland as their people scattered across the globe for jobs and education. In this, there should be no limit: People shall be “influenced” and “nurtured by the patriotic thoughts and spirit all times and everywhere in their daily life,” stated the Party’s Central Committee in 1994. It was a grand ambition, and the Party’s hand reached down not only into the schoolroom but also across film, television, and news media. Patriotism is “thought to be the most effective weapon against the danger of losing Chinese identity and against all kinds of foreign invasions—political, military, economic, and cultural,” writes Maosen.
Of course, China isn’t the first or even the most fervent nation to try to cultivate a population of patriots. Many American students sing the national anthem each day, and the Fourth of July holiday celebrating US independence from England is a national holiday of parades, barbecues, and flag-bearing patriots. In India, people must stand for the national anthem before watching a movie; many cinemas in Thailand will show a video of their king prior to the main feature and require the audience to stand. Russian high school students must endure military training each year, much like the People’s Liberation Army–run equivalent that is required of Chinese schoolchildren of every stripe.
Mused the academic Joel Westheimer:
If you stepped into a school at a moment of patriotic expression, how could you tell whether you were in a totalitarian nation or a democratic one? Both the totalitarian nation and the democratic one might have students sing a national anthem. You might hear a hip-hip-hooray kind of cheer for our land emanating from the assembly hall of either school. Flags and symbols of national pride might be front and center in each school. And the students of each school might observe a moment of silence for members of their country’s armed forces who had been killed in combat.
Here’s the distinction: China is singularly unapologetic—and unabashed—in deploying its education system as a governing technique. When the pro-democracy movement Occupy Central brought Hong Kong to a standstill for seventy-nine days, officials in Beijing quickly assigned blame to the lack of patriotic education in the city’s school curriculum. “It is clear that there have been problems all along with education in Hong Kong,” said China’s former deputy Hong Kong official, Chen Zuo’er. Chen then prescribed a cure of “national security and sovereignty” to prevent the growth of “noxious weeds,” his term for the students who sat in peaceful protest.
An agenda of persevering patriotism continues in college. China is one of the few countries in the world to deliver a political curriculum inside higher education, with content dictated by the Communist Party.
To me, all this heavy-handedness seemed a bit out of touch with reality, as the Chinese had increasing access to information through the Internet—not to mention counterintuitive. In particular, I wondered how China’s leaders could cultivate critical thinking in education—one of many ongoing reform attempts—while also pushing a patriotic agenda? I turned to Beijing academic Xie Xiaoqing. “Might the students begin to question certain elements of their education if they’re encouraged to think too freely? Wouldn’t the leadership consider this dangerous?” I asked him.
Xie insisted on speaking English, and he became loose-lipped while grandstanding in his second language. “The top leaders hope to develop the students’ critical thinking in the fields of physics, mathematics, chemistry, and biology and so on,” he admitted, “but not in the fields of politics, ethics, and religion.”
Not in the fields of politics, ethics, and religion.
That classroom flag defines the parameters for society: Change is fine, as long as those four yellow stars—the Chinese people—are always fixed in orbit around the large yellow star. For the most extraordinary students, official membership in the Communist Party awaits, and the long process of grooming begins early in a schoolchild’s career.
So it began with Rainey and his classmates at Soong Qing Ling.
“I get to be zhirisheng—student-on-duty—this week!” Rainey told me one day, jumping around our living room.
“What does that mean, Rainey?” I asked, wondering if this would launch his journey down the Red Road.
“I get to put rice in everybody’s bowl at lunch,” he said. “I add water to the strawberry, bean, and carrot plants. I feed the class caterpillars. I also announce when kids can go outside to play after they finish their morning snack.”
Teachers begin rotating children through this student-on-duty position in kindergarten. The purpose is threefold: Teachers get help with classroom tasks, students learn about service to their community, and classmates can take note of how well individual students help their peers. These notes on service are useful when elections for class monitor roll around; in primary, middle, and senior high school years such positions come with power and opportunity, such as the duty of disciplining peers and working closely with school administrators.
I’d always been uncomfortable with the idea that individual students—chosen ones—might have power over their classmates, but in kindergarten such exercises begin innocently. Rainey’s teachers ran mock elections for class monitor, and the first time he ran, our son was bested by his classmate, a chipper little girl named Lianpeng. Votes were tallied by body count, and Teacher Song sent by WeChat a picture of the girl’s moment of victory: Rainey and Lianpeng standing side by side, with a long line of classmates snaking behind each child.
Finger-tapping the screen, I counted heads: Ten children stood behind Rainey, while thirteen trailed Lianpeng.
Rainey had lost by three. Undaunted, my little boy began immediately strategizing for his next campaign. “Lianpeng had a good speech,” Rainey chirped, matter-of-factly. “Lianpeng said stuff that was longer, and more better, and there was more stuff.”
A few election cycles later, Rainey finally won by four.
“Mom, you want to hear my speech?” he said, planting in front of our television, words tumbling out tentatively in Mandarin. Every time he forgot a line, he glanced upward, as if expecting the words to rain into his mouth:
Dear teachers and classmates, I want to be your class monitor. I will serve everyone. If anyone bumps into difficulties, I’ll help them solve the problem. If anyone gets hurt, I’ll talk to the teacher to ask for help. . . . Please vote for me.
“Great speech, Rainey,” I said. “I guess that was enough stuff this time, right?”
“Yes,” he beamed. “I said a lot of stuff.”
That week, his place in the pecking order was clear. “Because I’m class monitor, I get to tell the student-on-duty what to do,” Rainey told me. He brandished a badge he’d attached to his shirt, and high-stepped around our living room to a tune I couldn’t hear.
Did President Xi Jinping do the same as a youngster? “It’s just play-acting,” I tried to reassure myself.
Where I was troubled, Teacher Song was thrilled. “The children work seriously and efficiently, and when they manage order in the classroom as student-on-duty, they become ‘little teachers,’” she effused in the Child Development Book. “In this way, the activity can not only correct children’s bad behaviors in the early age but also enhance their sense of serving others in the classroom. That’s really ‘killing two birds with one stone.’”
The cultivation continues in primary school, where all children are encouraged to join Young Pioneers, whose mission statement includes “following the instructions of th
e Party . . . being successors to the cause of Communism.” At fourteen, things start to get serious, and students with the blessing of two League members can apply to the Communist Youth League, akin to a school “for young people to learn about socialism with Chinese characteristics and about Communism, and to serve as a helper and reserve members for the Party,” as its constitution states. (Both Premier Li Keqiang and former president Hu Jintao rose through the ranks of the Communist Youth League.)
Today there are nearly ninety million members of the Communist Youth League in China, and another eighty-nine million in the Party proper.
Darcy, my young high school friend in Shanghai, planned to join the Party by his eighteenth birthday.
At seventeen, Darcy was already one of the chosen ones. “I am a jijifenzi—and my plan is working,” he told me, using a term that means “zealot” or “enthusiast,” and is also a status designated by the Party. By his junior year in high school, teachers in his grade had vouched for him, and he was chosen to start the process: He’d already been given initiation rites, attended special classes, and written reports praising the Party. It was an invitation bestowed upon only three of four hundred students in his grade level.
He showed me a letter he’d penned as part of his application. The title was “Walking on the Red Road”:
They are brave, regardless of war or disaster.
They always run ahead, throwing your head to shed blood.
They are wise, with farsighted leadership of a new China.
They are walking on the red road people, they are Communists!
Darcy’s list of accomplishments revealed a distinguished Young Pioneer with the right kind of grooming to serve in the league—disciplinary board member, discipline inspector, vice squad leader—and the boy concluded that he would work to secure the long future of the Communist Party: “I set foot on the red road, in front of the older generation of revolutionaries, and we will try to catch up, take the stick in their hands, overcome all obstacles, so that the red road is wider and longer!”
