Beijing, China -- China’s top education official called last week for increased politicization of education. His remarks were published after university students held small but defiant campus protests here to mark the second anniversary of the June 4 massacre in Tiananmen Square.
The official, Li Tieying, the minister in charge of China’s State Education Commission, called for more Communist indoctrination in the teaching of Chinese history to ward off subversion by foreigners.
“The struggle against hostile international forces attempting to win over the younger Chinese generation will exist for a long period of time,” Mr. Li said in a speech reported by the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily.
The term “hostile international forces” is a commonly used allusion to the West, particularly the United States.
People’s Daily quoted Mr. Li as saying that instruction in history should be designed to “foster Communist ideals.” He warned that negligence in indoctrinating students would lead to “ideological confusion and political mistakes.”
Mr. Li’s remarks were the first official hard-line comments to be reported in China during the sensitive period surrounding the June 4 anniversary. State-run news media were under strict orders to ignore the event itself, sources here said.
The minister’s comments appeared to be aimed primarily at Beijing University, where students staged scattered protests in the days leading up to June 4. In the face of tough security measures, no major demonstrations occurred.
All the same, at around midnight on June 3, students at a graduate dormitory at Beijing University jeered and hurled glass bottles from windows at policemen who were patrolling a street next to the campus. The next night, undergraduate students also smashed several bottles on the campus.
The smashing of bottles in China is an overt form of protest aimed at the senior leader Deng Xiaoping, whose given name sounds like the Chinese words for “small bottle.”
It was not known whether any students were arrested or detained at Beijing University. During the previous week, graduate students there defiantly hung a poster from a dormitory building proclaiming, “We will never forget June 4,” and distributed leaflets calling the 1989 massacre an “atrocity.”
Beijing University, a center of the 1989 pro-democracy movement here, has a long history of protest, and China’s elderly leaders are particularly wary of the institution. Last week dozens of undercover policemen patrolled the campus to discourage any signs of mourning for the hundreds of unarmed protesters who were killed during the army’s assault on Tiananmen Square two years ago.
The authorities strictly controlled access to the spacious campus, assigning young English-speaking teachers to posts at the university’s gates in an attempt to screen out foreign reporters. Officials moved quickly to prevent any semblance of a gathering, dispersing students who were talking and singing in small groups on a lawn in front of the central campus library on the night of June 3.
Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, carried a dispatch on the night of June 4 that blamed foreign students and foreign reporters for the disturbances at Beijing University. Other campuses in the capital reportedly were quiet.
