Netizen Voices: University Warns Against “Universal Values,” “Civil Society,” and “The West’s Idea of Journalism”

A screenshot of a college lecture warning of “seven false tides of thought” inside greater schooling demonstrates the Chinese language Communist Get together’s continued worry that college students don’t ascribe to its ideology. The screenshot appears to stem from a Shaanxi College of Science and Know-how lecture on “Points and Challenges Confronting Ideological-Political Work in Greater Schooling.” The seven supposedly faulty strains of pondering are drawn from a directive issued by the Get together’s Central Committee in 2013, broadly often known as “Doc 9,” that warned: “Western anti-China forces and inner ‘dissidents’ are nonetheless actively attempting to infiltrate China’s ideological sphere.” CDT has translated the slide and a collection of netizen reactions archived by CDT Chinese language: 

[Presentation:] Points and Challenges Confronting Ideological-Political Work in Greater Schooling
[Slide 1:] Challenges Dealing with the Guiding Ideology of Marxism in an More and more Various Society

Seven False Tides of Thought

1. Western Constitutional Democracy
2. Common Values
3. Neoliberalism
4. Civil Society
5. The West’s Concept of Journalism
6. Historic Nihilism
7. The “Two Questionings” [i.e. questioning China’s “Reform and Opening” policies, and questioning the socialist nature of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”]

Chosen netizen reactions: 

北国微音2020：These are treasured [legacies] of human civilization. Why should we shut them out?

Hongmo68：I’m telling this joke with a straight face: unification of thought. 

神七仔：I don’t dare communicate on the opposite factors, however I do need to quietly inquire, how is it that selling “civil society” has grow to be a false ideology? Are we not residents? Is linking “citizen” and “society” collectively by some means reactionary? It wasn’t till I checked my ID and noticed “Resident Identification Card” written in giant characters that I got here to the conclusion: you’re a resident, you’re a peon … however a citizen? How dare you!

安安年年55555：Why is it that everybody else is mistaken and solely you’re proper? Why is it that the entire developed international locations on the earth advocate for variety, however you may solely tolerate one voice?

Wenjun7011：Are “civil society” and “common values” mistaken, too? Aren’t these included amongst our “Core Socialist Values”?

小企鹅1551：That is phenomenally anti-intellectual. There’s no want to debate whether or not a number of of the above ideologies may in truth be dangerous, seeing as even “common values” and “civil society” have been lumped in with ideologies that have to be categorically rejected. They don’t need you to assume too deeply about it, however quite simply shut up and obey. The Western humanities and social sciences’ “critique of modernity” is located inside “postmodernist angst,” whereas we [in China] are nonetheless residing in a pre-modern age. 

OldYouthZ：These seven “faulty ideological developments” really come from an April 22, 2013 inner directive on the state of the ideological sphere: “A Communiqué on the Present State of the Ideological Sphere,” revealed by the Basic Workplace of the Central Committee of the Communist Get together of China. The doc states that it’s essential to “be certain that the media management is at all times firmly managed by somebody who maintains an equivalent ideology with the Get together’s Central Committee, below Basic Secretary Xi Jinping’s management.” (It’s attention-grabbing that at the moment they nonetheless referred to him as “Basic Secretary” quite than right this moment’s “Core.”) [Chinese]

The lecture could be construed as a part of an effort to show China’s safety equipment right into a “hulking fortress,” as described in a groundbreaking New York Occasions report by Chris Buckley and Steven Lee Meyer concerning the nation’s Nationwide Safety Fee. Whereas describing Xi Jinping’s efforts to stave off a “colour revolution,” worry of which he has informed interlocutors retains him up at evening, the report described how colleges have grow to be a frontline of the safety state, with even elementary schoolers inspired to grow to be informants for the Ministry of State Safety: 

Chinese language universities have been pressed to look at and report on “ideological” issues amongst lecturers and college students, which included protecting monitor of their on-line feedback. Safety officers ordered cadres to carefully monitor persistent protesters, folks with histories of psychological sickness, former prisoners and others deemed dangers to security and stability.

[…] Youngsters additionally soak up Mr. Xi’s precepts every Nationwide Safety Schooling Day on April 15, which commemorates the primary assembly of the Nationwide Safety Fee in 2014.

In a single college in Beijing, youngsters this yr drew footage of vigilant residents beating up masked villains. “In defending nationwide safety, no person is an outsider or a bystander,” mentioned a presentation at an elementary college in northwest China.

It reminded the pupils of the Ministry of State Safety’s cellphone quantity for reporting something suspicious: 12339. [Source]

Reporting on friends’ or professors’ heterodox ideologies is a doubtlessly profitable endeavor. In June, the Ministry of State Safety standardized rewards for informants, providing as much as 100,000 yuan (almost $15,000 U.S. {dollars}) for essential ideas. In December 2021, a college professor was fired after a pupil recorded her remarks concerning the Nanjing Bloodbath whereas referring to her as a “strolling 500k,” slang for the reward one might as soon as earn for delivering purported spies. Extra just lately, there was a quick panic about overseas infiltration of the Ministry of Schooling and the textbook trade: in keeping with nationalistic on-line commentators, the illustrations in sure textbooks have been ugly to the purpose of being “evil” and ideologically suspect. As a part of an effort to implement ideological conformity, English classes have taken a backseat to Xi Jinping Thought in some college districts. But regardless of the state’s finest efforts to bend college students in direction of its ends, pupil protests have continued into an period of accelerating ideological surveillance, as documented by CDT’s Alex Yu.