Post-Graduate Work

The last thing China needs is more peasants, but apparently it’s going to get some anyway. The government has announced a new program to require most college graduates to spend up to two years working on farms or in factories before they can seek advanced degrees. At a time when a labor surplus in the countryside has sent millions of villagers to the cities searching for jobs, tens of thousands of educated young people face a period of forced labor among workers certain to resent their attitudes, their accents, their very presence.

None of this makes any economic sense, but economics has nothing to do with the new policy. Its motivation is wholly ideological, the aim being to teach humility and a new respect for communist values to a group that, especially since last spring’s demonstrations, has come to be regarded as arrogant, overly privileged and insufficiently appreciative of the revolutionary zeal and sacrifices of its elders. This new program is obviously reprisal for the spring outbreak of what the Communist Party regularly denounces as “bourgeois liberalism.” Those demonstrations were largely led by students of history, law, political science. Significantly, it will be students in the social sciences who are to be especially singled out for terms of manual labor.

Official spitefulness doesn’t end there. Authorities also have announced that first-year enrollment at prestigious Beijing University will be cut by 60%, to only 800 students. Before they can start school, however, the freshmen must take a year of “patriotic education” in an army academy. The point is to instill “correct political attitudes.” Anyone found not to have developed such attitudes can forget about further higher education.

That the old men who rule China still believe in ideological indoctrination as an effective way to alter human nature is evidence either of a sublime faith or, more probably, of an utter inability to learn from experience. What the recent ferment among students, intellectuals and others in China has shown precisely is that decades of intense and unremitting indoctrination haven’t stopped people from thinking for themselves. The latest efforts to remold minds and attitudes won’t change that. All that will likely be accomplished is that higher education in China will be set back still more, and with it some of the country’s hopes for desperately needed economic development.