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The Effect of Post-4 June Re-education Campaigns on Chinese Students

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Stanley Rosen
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Extract

Nearly four years have passed since China's leaders ordered the military to crush student demonstrators and their supporters in and around Tiananmen Square. Since then, students at all levels have been given a massive infusion of political “re-education” in an attempt to forestall a recurrence of the turbulence and, more ambitiously, to win back the hearts and minds of Chinese youth. The methods employed by the authorities have included an extended programme of military training, tighter political control over the job assignment system, more time in the curriculum for politics courses, a renewed stress on familiar model personages from the pre-Cultural Revolution era, an upgrading in the status of political work cadres, and an abandonment of the more flexible political and moral education courses and textbooks introduced in the 1980s in favour of a return to more traditional “classical” Marxist approaches.

Type
Chinese Education Since Tiananmen
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 134 , June 1993 , pp. 310 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1993

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References

1. See CPC Central Committee Document No. 2, translated in Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Report, China (hereafter FBIS-CHI, 13 March 1992, pp. 20–23 (Hong Kong Jingji ribao, 12 March) and FBIS-CHI, 12 March 1992, pp. 20–21 (Xinhua, 11 March).

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26. When Zhongguo qingnian (China Youth) resumed publication, a discussion forum from September 1978 to January 1979 contrasted Chen's expertise to Lei's “redness.” For details, see Rosen, Stanley, “Prosperity, privatization and China's youth,” Problems of Communism, 03–04 1985, p. 5Google Scholar.

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41. Many of the major points are covered in Licheng, Ma (ed.), Shekou fengbo (The Shekou Storm) (Beijing: Zhongguo xinwen chubanshe, 1989)Google Scholar. When I interviewed Li in Beijing in August 1992 he was still very bitter about the incident, claiming that the true story has never been reported and that local Shenzhen news organizations had deliberately distorted his argument.

42. One such extensive survey is discussed in Rosen, Stanley, “Political education and student response: some background factors behind the 1989 Beijing demonstrations,” Issues and Studies, No. 10 (10 1989), pp. 12–39Google Scholar.

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49. FBIS-CHI, 6 March 1992, pp. 20–22 (Zhengming, March 1992).

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