(Trying to) Talk Politics with Chinese High School Students

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to attend “Political Education” class at a Beijing high school. It was certainly an experience.

On my way over, I chatted with a twenty-something Chinese language instructor from Minzu University. She was less than thrilled with the prospect of the class. ‘It’s not political education,’ she told me, ‘it’s brainwashing.’ When I pressed her on the comment, she explained that not much has changed since she was a high schooler. Then as now, political education classes contain no diversity of opinion and few facts. There is always one ‘right’ answer, the one that comes straight from the textbook. I suppose this is the same ideology that drives the “Socialist Theory” schools of higher education sprinkled throughout every Chinese city. As I’ve been told, students there engage in deep study of Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and such. When they graduate, they are bestowed government jobs and given the task of ensuring current policies adhere to doctrine.

Hannah Hindel / Contributing Photographer.

As it turned out, class wasn’t too different from how the young woman had billed it. After a customary “Hello Teacher!” from the class, the roughly sixty year old instructor launched right in to the proper course of entering socialism. His first slide pictured the side by side tracks of the USSR and the PRC and how, according to theory, once a nation entered the advanced state that the USSR did in the 1960’s, a cross over to China’s then-immature form of socialist integration was impossible. All very standard stuff.