Political Texts in Chinese Universities Before and After Tiananmen

T HERE are many different approaches to studying political education in China, each of which yields interesting insights into the changes in thought and consciousness arising in the process of rapid social and economic change over the last decade. Stanley Rosen's work has opened up to us the world of Chinese surveys, with all their revealing details on changing youth attitudes towards the party, the state and a range of moral issues. 1 In spite of limitations in survey design and concerns about how forthright young people are in answering survey questions, this research probably gives us the most profound understanding of youth attitudes and values in the contemporary period. Approaching the question from the opposite end, the teaching of moral-political education in Chinese schools, Ronald Price has analyzed the textbooks being used, bringing to light a series of emerging contradictions between traditional socialist values of serving the collective and new concerns about productivity, profit and the socialist commodity economy. While Price believes school textbooks have far less influence on moral-political behaviour than other social influences, he makes the important point that students learn the vocabulary for thinking about moral political questions at school.2 This point was underlined for me by a lengthy conversation between a young Chinese university teacher and a socialist colleague of mine from Canada over some of the dilemmas of China's modernization. In replying to probing questions from the Canadian socialist, this teacher was able to articulate China' s dilemma around the concept of a dichotomy between values of equity and efficiency. In my later reading of recent Chinese political texts, it was interesting to find this same discussion, suggesting how he had come to think in these terms.3