Moral Education in Communist China

Partly as a result of the Confucian legacy, Chinese Communists emphasized the importance of human initiative in participating in the socialist activities. Instead of laws like in this country, party policies were often implemented in establishing model citizens, and called on the rest of the country to emulate them. Here we are primarily concerned with the socialist transformation of society through the transformation of youth.

The following are a few examples of the Chinese heroes that I grew up with. Contrast them with your heroes. With many of them a motto was attached, which sometimes reminds me of the commercial songs associated with certain products in the U.S.

Lei Feng

Lei Feng died on Aug. 15, 1962 and March 15 of every year since then has been designated the day to commerorate him. He was made famous by Communist Party Chairman Mao's slogan "Learn from Lei Feng," and his calligraphy of the slogan was made into a poster pasted in many Chinese classrooms.

Zhang Side and Norman Bethune were heroes associated with the motto "to serve the people." They belonged to an earlier generation of heroes from Lei Feng but glorified the same spirit: selflessness.

There were also other heroes, such as Dong Cunrei, and Huang Jiguang, as well as more contemporary heroes, very often young male martyrs from the People's Liberation Army, and occasionally female martyrs from an earlier age.

When we were in school, our Chinese lesson textbooks were often filled with stories of these heroes. Associated with the study of these heroes, we had to study many pieces of works by Mao Tse-tung, and three of the most popular of his writings were: "In Memory of Norman Bethune", "Serve the People", and "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains". These three articles by Mao were termed the "Three old articles" (in Chinese culture, old is a respectful way of addressing someone, for instance, the term teacher is preceded by "old," even though some teachers are very young; and a respectful way of addressing not very old people is to call them old so and so; thus old articles here was a respectful way of addressing these three articles.) We had to memorize at least part of them in school, and they were printed into pamplets and circulated every where. Basically, they stressed selflessness, persistence, and faith in one's cause, which was to serve the people and the Communist Party that represented the people.

The hero of Rae Yang:

Rae Yang's hero was a product of this moral education. Its characteristics were typical of both top revolutionary leaders and the propaganda about revolutionaries:

• the hero came from a well-to-do background and had even been abroad, as a small group Chinese Communist leaders had experienced (and a larger number of Communist followers probably had such an experience),
• he looked down on wealth and power, and was unbribable by the opposition government;
• he was extraordinarily brave and a great Communist leader who was betrayed by his own parent, a trope often used in Communist China where people were asked to "draw a neat line" between themselves and those of their family members who did not identify with the "people" but identified with the "counter-revolutionaries, the Nationalists and Americans, and other bourgeois elements."
• he went through tremendous torture by the Nationalists. Nationalists' torture of Communist prisoners was sensationally propagandized after Communists seized power in China.
• he and his fiancee were completely selfless for the cause of the Communist Party, which was also the cause of China.
• the hero was one who completely abandoned his old class background, transformed himself into a member of the "people" and "served the people heart and soul."

Contrast the socialist moral education with your own educational experience. Where do you think the end products of the two kinds of education differ most?