Teaching students a lesson

Press, 5 September 1989, Page 12

Teaching students a lesson

From the China correspondent of the “Economist”

"WE WANT to guide students so that they become close to the workers and peasants,” says China’s Deputy Minister of Education. Which is why China’s unluckiest students are to be packed off either to the Army or to fields and factories.

Let the Deputy Minister, Mr He Dongchang, explain: “During the unrest and counter-revolu-tionary turmoil we painfully saw how students had gone farther and farther along the road of bourgeois liberalism.” He means the students’ prodemocracy demonstrations last spring in Tiananmen Square, and their naive calls for reform of the Communist Party and an end to corruption. A stint .of “reeducation,” by political indoctrination and manual labour, is the obvious cure for the students’ wrdng-headedness — just as it was during the cultural revolution in 1966-76.

Surely history cannot repeat

itself so ludicrously? So far the Government’s revenge is being taken only on a small fraction of China’s 1.9 million college students. A full year of military training is the fate of the firstyear intake of Peking University, and this intake will be only 800, rather than the 2000 originally planned. “A year or two” in the fields or factories awaits only the 35,000 students who should, next month, be starting their graduate courses (“especially those in the social sciences,” as the “China Daily” put it last week, pointing the finger at the main source of “bourgeois liberalism”). Yet however limited the waste of time and intelligence, the pain will be real enough for those inolved. Soldiers, farmers and factory workers will not welcome the students. The students, inexpert and unmotivated, will increase inefficiency and reduce profits (and

so everyone else’s bonuses). No wonder many students fear being lost in a rural limbo, disliked by the peasants but unable to get the documents needed to return to the cities.

Their best hope is not that the regime will somehow become liberal, but that it will bend to economic pressures and administrative difficulties. Thre is already a lot of unemployment and underemployment in China’s towns and countryside, which is why people drift by the hundreds of thousands to Peking and richer coastal provinces like Guangdong. Forcibly putting students out to work would only add to these woes.

Even China’s old-model conservative leaders may quietly conclude that a phony re-educa-tion campaign is not really worth the time, cost and effort.

Copyright — The Economist