Creating a revolutionary tradition
At the beginning of 2021, the Ministry of Education launched an educational campaign with the aim of bolstering young people’s allegiance to the party. In an international environment where China is under intense pressure to justify its increasingly relentless authoritarian stance, this campaign is the expression of a deep anxiety about the preservation of the party’s revolutionary credentials and political legitimacy.
The preservation of “the red genes” lies at the heart of this campaign, as shown in this analysis by the China Media Project: Our Colour Must not Fade. Back in January 2021 the Ministry of Education issued guidelines on how to inculcate the revolutionary tradition into the minds of young children through the primary and secondary school curriculum.
This was followed by further instructions on how to teach children from a young age to “follow the party forever” using a series of tools from short video clips to class assemblies celebrating the “party spirit”, to patriotic education through red tourism.
The study of Xi Jinping’s New Era Thought is seamlessly brought together with a party/state history that focuses on the establishment of the “New China”. In this narrative, “New China” begins with the glorious foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949. China’s development is tracked through the “Reform and Opening” policies launched in 1978 that “opened” China to the world after the end of the Mao era, to its reconstitution as the major global power that it is today.
Conveniently brushing over the disasters of the Mao era, such as the purges of “rightist” intellectuals, the famine of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, these new guidelines aim to make children from primary school age to “unswervingly obey the party”.
Xi wants to go back to the revolutionary roots of his party without the social turmoil attached to it. The exact opposite of a revolution.