The Effect of Post-4 June Re-education Campaigns on Chinese Students

Nearly four years have passed since China's leaders ordered the military to crush student demonstrators and their supporters in and around Tiananmen Square. Since then, students at all levels have been given a massive infusion of political “re-education” in an attempt to forestall a recurrence of the turbulence and, more ambitiously, to win back the hearts and minds of Chinese youth. The methods employed by the authorities have included an extended programme of military training, tighter political control over the job assignment system, more time in the curriculum for politics courses, a renewed stress on familiar model personages from the pre-Cultural Revolution era, an upgrading in the status of political work cadres, and an abandonment of the more flexible political and moral education courses and textbooks introduced in the 1980s in favour of a return to more traditional “classical” Marxist approaches.