Roving Periscope: Xi does a Mao, to indoctrinate students with “thoughts”
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Faced with mounting international and internal challenges, embattled Beijing is doing what best it can protect the supremacy of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and integrity of the country: the way CPC founder Mao Zedong indoctrinated and ‘re-educated generations of Chinese people with his “Red Book”, President-for-Life Xi Jinping has taken a leaf out of the Chairman’s logbook to re-indoctrinate future citizens while they are still in their schools.
With this objective, China is introducing Xi’s political ‘ideology’ in its national curriculum for schools and colleges, in what is seen as his latest effort to consolidate the ruling CPC’s, that is his, complete grip on power for the future.
The ‘re-education’ project, called “Xi Jinping’s Thoughts on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” will be incorporated into textbooks for students at all levels, its Ministry of Education announced early this week.
The guidelines, issued by the National Textbook Committee (NTC), said textbooks would reflect the will of the CPC and the nation and directly impact the direction and quality of talent cultivation, state-run China Daily reported on Wednesday.
The Xi ideology will be integrated into the curriculum covering basic, vocational and various subjects of higher education, Han Zhen, an NTC member, said.
Henceforth, the primary schools will concentrate on cultivating the love for the country, the CPC, and socialism while the focus will be on a combination of perceptual experience and knowledge study in middle schools to help students form basic political judgments and opinions.
In colleges, more emphasis will be placed on the establishment of theoretical thinking, according to state-run Global Times.
Believed to be the most powerful leader in China after Mao, President Xi is expected to continue in power for an unprecedented third term beginning 2022. Xi, 68, who heads the CPC, the military, and Presidency, will complete his second five-year term as head of the party next year.
But unlike his predecessors, he may buck the mandatory retirement rule of two terms, as the amended Constitution removed the two-term limit for the President in 2018.
Now, Xi, whom the CPC made the “core leader” and put him on a higher pedestal in the party’s leadership structure, may well continue in power for life. Since he took over the reins of the CPC in late 2012, he consolidated his grip on power with the high-intensity anti-corruption campaign in which over a million officials including several top military personnel were punished.
He also launched many political initiatives including the realization of the Chinese dream broadly defined as reclaiming the lost greatness of the nation, making China a moderately prosperous society, elimination of absolute poverty, consolidation of the CPC’s power over the military, and integration of Hong Kong and Taiwan with the mainland, among others. His ultra-ambitious brainchild, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), signed in by some 60 nations across Asia, Africa, and Europe, however, is facing the indigenous heat in different nations.
As he sets out for a third term, Xi recently launched a fresh initiative called ‘common prosperity for all Chinese’ a new policy of redistribution of wealth.
It may end the era of billionaires in the country. They number over 800 in China and acquired enormous power through wealth creation. It was to crush them as new ‘capitalist’ challengers that China recently punished Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma in a bid to warn ‘Red Billionaires’ not to cross the Red Line.
