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Economic Necessity and Political Ideals in Educational Reform During the Cultural Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Marianne Bastid
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Extract

Educational reform has been one of the important issues raised during the Cultural Revolution, not merely because it belongs to the realm of culture but, more important, because it bears on the question of “cultivating revolutionary successors” and on the shaping of the whole future of China. Anyone seizing power wishes to keep it for a certain length of time; it is however a special feature of people's revolutions to set their goals on the prospect of a boundless future. In this regard, gaining power in education is not simply one side of the struggle for actual total power (mastering the “superstructure” as well as the “structure”) it is the guarantee of everlasting rule, on the assumption that the mind is ultimately the only thing man can rely upon and which is entirely within his grasp. As one slogan puts it: “The earth may shake, heaven may fall, but we shall ever be faithful to Chairman Mao.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 42 , June 1970 , pp. 16 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1970

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References

* This article was completed in December 1969 and does not include any information available only after that date.Google Scholar

1 Jen-min jih-pao (People's Daily) (Peking), 19 05 1969, p. 3, report on Kuangshan district in Honan.Google Scholar

2 The attack was led by the 1966 graduates of Peking No. 1 girls middle school who protested against the system of admission to institutions of higher learning in a letter of 6 June 1966 to the Central Committee and Chairman Mao. On 13 June 1966, a circular from the Central Committee declared that the entrance examinations to institutions of higher learning should be radically reformed and that those institutions would not enroll new students for six months. The two documents appear in Kuang-ming jih-pao (KMJP), 18 06 1966. Though some later reports casually refer to somebody as a first-year university student (e.g., People's Daily, 16 September 1968, p. 3, which mentions a first-year student of Korean in Peking University), there is no evidence that universities and colleges have regularly resumed admission.Google Scholar

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4 See, for example, People's Daily, 18 10 1968, p. 1, in Current Background (CB) (Hong Kong), No 868, pp. 1–5Google Scholar, on criticism in a Chekiang rural area, and People's Daily, 7 03 1968 (CB, No. 854), on criticism in the Ts'ao-ch'ang-ti middle school in Peking.Google Scholar

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6 KMJP, 15 November 1968, p. 1, this did not include board. Unless otherwise specified, the preceding and following figures are from direct inquiries by the author in various places in 1965 and early 1966.Google Scholar

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25 Translated in CB, No. 852, p. 99. Precise reference to it is found in a report on East China Normal University (KMJP, 5 July 1967, p. 2).Google Scholar

26 On 19 March 1967, a circular from the Central Committee said that the plan for resuming country-wide revolutionary exchanges in and after the coming spring, which had been announced in December, was cancelled (CB, No. 852, p. 108).Google Scholar

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31 For instance, KMJP, 11 07 1967, p. 2.Google Scholar

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33 See above, note 22.Google Scholar

34 The epithet “bourgeois” applies to features prevailing among the socio-economic group traditionally called “bourgeoisie.” It does not imply that all people belonging to this group by birth share all these characteristics (though most of them do more or less), neither that people from other groups may not be “bourgeois.”Google Scholar

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38 People's Daily, 3 11 1967, p. 1 (CB, No. 846).Google Scholar

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44 People's Daily, 22 07 1968, p. 1. Italics are mine.Google Scholar

45 The report on the Shanghai machine-tools plant was published also in the People's Daily, 22 07 1968.Google Scholar

46 In Peking the first workers' propaganda team had been sent to Ts'ing-hua University on 27 July 1968 (People's Daily, 29 January 1969, p. 1). By the end of August several scores had been dispatched to other schools in the capital (People's Daily, 27 August 1968, p. 1). In Canton, according to witnesses, the workers entered Sun Yat-sen University in July. On the opinion of the workers' teams about theoretical studies, see for instance, KMJP, 7 August 1969, p. 1; People's Daily, 14 April 1969, p. 4, from Tsitsihar city.Google Scholar

47 Hung-ch'i (Red Flag) (Peking), No. 2 (1968), p. 4.Google Scholar

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50 KMJP, 19 07 1969, p. 3, in Peking Normal University and Nankai University.Google Scholar

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61 But let me point out at once that in this particular context wen-hua applies to fields where a knowledge of reading and writing is necessary. One can master politics and Mao Tse-tung's thought without it.Google Scholar

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68 I.e., the Yenan middle school in Tientsin, T'ung-ch'i University in Shanghai, Ts'ao-ch'ang-ti middle school in Peking, which have been used as a kind of “test-schools” for carrying out the Cultural Revolution. As to Peking University, see Victor Nee, “The cultural revolution at Peking University,” Monthly Review (New York), Vol. XXI, No. 3 (07–08 1969)Google Scholar; what happened there in 1966 is fairly well known but further developments which seem to have involved very fierce struggle are fairly obscure (see People's Daily, 16 09 1968, p. 3, and KMJP, 6 October 1969, p. 1, which reports the foundation of a revolutionary committee on 27 September).Google Scholar

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70 People's Daily, 10 12 1968, p. 2, in a Shanghai work-study school.Google Scholar

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73 Red Flag, No. 2 (1969), p. 31Google Scholar; People's Daily, 28 07 1969, p. 3, in Peking No. 23 middle school.Google Scholar

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81 From a reliable informer, who stated further that one of his relatives was thus learning English on top of the mountains near Yenan.Google Scholar

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95 The min-pan concept and its applications are very well analysed by Mark Selden in his still unpublished thesis, People's War and the Revolutionary Transformation of Chinese Society. The Yenan Way (Yale University), on the schools (see Chapter 6, pp. 73–81); see also his article, Yenan Legacy: the Mass Line, in Barnett, A. Doak (ed.), Chinese Communist Politics in Action (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), pp. 145–148.Google Scholar

96 Red Flag, No. 2 (1969), pp. 23–24.Google Scholar

97 Significant with regard to the charges against elites and elitism are the KMJP editorials of 15 and 23 07 1968, also the articles on p. 2 in the latter issueGoogle Scholar