Teaching Comparative

Marxism in China

Blog riches.

I was going to write something about the impressive teaching plans written by the participants in Carleton College's Summer Teaching Institute for Comparative Government and Politics. A dozen of us spent a week together thinking and talking about teaching comparative politics. As part of the institute course, this group of talented and thoughtful teachers created teaching plans. They are great schemes for teaching important ideas.

But more about that later, because there are so many things to think about today.

First comes the report by Mitchell Landsberg in the Los Angeles Times that required Marxism studies in China are routinely viewed as boring duties by Chinese students.

If you've read Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk (or seen the 1990 movie version of it), you will know that the boredom Landsberg reports is only an extension of the boredom seen in xiaozu (political study groups) and official meetings for years. ("It's only boring if you try to pay attention.")

Today, the relevance of Marxism is obviously more questionable. Landsberg ends his article by quoting a Beijing education official as saying of the students, "They don't believe in God or communism," he said. "They're practical. They only worship the money."

Follow Landsberg's report with the announcement of Chen Zhu's appointment as health minister. (See also: Chen Zhu)

Are the changes extending beyond what we've been expecting?

Marx loses currency in new China

"Beijing — IT was like watching a man try to swim up a waterfall.

"Professor Tao Xiuao cracked jokes, told stories, projected a Power Point presentation on a large video screen. But his students at Beijing Foreign Studies University didn't even try to hide their boredom.

"Young men spread newspapers out on their desks and pored over the sports news. A couple of students listened to iPods; others sent text messages on their cellphones. One young woman with chic red-framed glasses spent the entire two hours engrossed in "Jane Eyre," in the original English. Some drifted out of class, ate lunch and returned. Some just lay their heads on their desktops and went to sleep.

"It isn't easy teaching Marxism in China these days...

"Classes in Marxist philosophy have been compulsory in Chinese schools since not long after the 1949 communist revolution. They remain enshrined in the national education law..

"But today's China is, in some respects, less socialistic than much of Western Europe, with a moth-eaten social safety net and a wild free-market economy. Students in almost any urban Chinese school can look out their classroom windows and see just about everything but socialism being constructed...

"Chinese education officials are acutely aware of the problem, and say they have substantially reformed the country's ideological education. They haven't given Marx the heave-ho, but students in up-to-date primary and secondary schools learn more about patriotism and ethical behavior than about class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat...

"Daniel A. Bell... wrote in the spring issue of Dissent magazine of his surprise at how little Marxism is actually discussed in China, even among Communist Party intellectuals.

"'The main reason Chinese officials and scholars do not talk about communism is that hardly anybody really believes that Marxism should provide guidelines for thinking about China's political future,' he wrote. 'The ideology has been so discredited by its misuses that it has lost almost all legitimacy in society…. To the extent there's a need for a moral foundation for political rule in China, it almost certainly won't come from Karl Marx.'..."

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A noncommunist health minister

June 30, 2007

"A French-educated scientist was named China's health minister, becoming only the second noncommunist appointed to the Cabinet since the 1970s.

"Chen Zhu's appointment comes as communist leaders reach outside the ruling Communist Party for expertise."

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Labels: China, political culture

posted by Ken Wedding @ 9:06 AM