Photographer: Nicolas Asfouri / AFP / Getty Images
Photographer: Nicolas Asfouri / AFP / Getty Images
China’s students are next in line to intensify the study of President Xi Jinping’s teachings ahead of the Communist Party’s centennial celebration in July.
The party’s Central Committee issued new guidelines on Wednesday to boost ideological education among Chinese Young Pioneers, a national youth organization to which it is affiliated. The guidelines said that all elementary school children and the first two years of high school should have one class per week to carry out the activities of the Young Pioneers, and the basic training materials for the faculty should be thought of Xi.
Young Pioneer members should be taught to “keep in mind” Xi’s teachings and “to do what Xi instructed”, the guidelines state.
In China, everyone, from diplomats to science fiction executives and writers, is under pressure to incorporate the broad and often confusing principles of “Thought Xi” into their policies, as part of an effort to elevate it alongside Maoism and help consolidate the president’s efforts to promote cement control.
Read more: Rise of ‘Xi thinking’ shows a long future for the one-man government in China
The document also urged children to be taught that “today’s happy life ultimately comes from the Party’s correct direction” as well as “from the superiority of our socialist system”.
Strengthening “political enlightenment and the formation of values” among children is of strategic importance to ensure that “red genes are passed on from generation to generation”, the party newspaper, Diário do Povo, said on its front page Thursday. , citing the guidelines.
Another state-supported newspaper, China Daily, cited the guidelines in a piece entitled “Cultivation of children seen as strategic”. The newspaper wrote that children are the future of the nation and the Communist Party, which has always made the country’s good cultivation a “strategic” and “fundamental” task.
The role of pioneers
The guidelines come when Xi visits a village in Guizhou province, which state media claims has successfully eradicated poverty. Posing for photos with Miao ethnic minority people dressed in traditional clothing, Xi sent greetings to all Chinese before the Lunar New Year, which this year falls on 11 February. The president also inspected the work on cleaning up a previously contaminated river.
Chinese Young Pioneers was founded in 1949 and includes almost all children in China between the ages of six and 14. He played an “irreplaceable role” in guiding generations of children to follow the party’s instructions, according to the guidelines.
Although it is unclear what its current membership was, 2007 data estimates the number at around 130 million.
The guidelines also advocated the promotion of exchanges between Young Pioneers from the Mainland and children’s organizations in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, in order to enhance the “national, ethnic and cultural identity” of young people in these areas.
– With the help of Colum Murphy and Jing Li