The Chinese Communist Party continues to tighten its grip on ideas, with increasingly stringent restrictions on school textbooks, library collections and even curriculums. Foreign media have revealed that some international schools run by British institutions are considering leaving China out of concern for the direction of Beijing’s policies.
Juliet Fairclough, editor of the Good Schools Guide, recently told The Times newspaper that some of the 50 British-run international schools in mainland China may be considering other options.
The newspaper said that these British-run international schools initially enrolled only foreign students, but later, in a competitive market, began enrolling Chinese students, but had to comply with Communist Party curriculum requirements that did not include content on topics deemed sensitive by the Communist Party, such as the June 4 massacre in Tiananmen Square, and that Chinese students under the age of 15 were less likely to have access to foreign textbooks. Bilingual private schools are among the schools that must comply with the CCP’s rules.
Ficklove said that some international schools are now recruiting mainly Chinese students, and these schools can only teach a similar curriculum as Chinese schools, and are therefore only nominally British schools; some institutions do not want to admit that they are opening branches in China because they may affect their brand reputation and do not have much control over the schools; and some educational institutions are considering going to places like Vietnam and Egypt.
Andrew Lewer, a British Member of Parliament, thinks it is a wise decision to pull out of China. In this climate, he said, opening a school in China is risky from a business point of view alone, and a new generation of parents and students in other countries may not want to be associated with the Communist Party and are reluctant to go to schools invested in China, so some educational institutions that have considered going to China are now looking for other markets or developing distance learning.
The Chinese Communist Party has been conducting a campaign to clean up books in primary and secondary school libraries in many parts of the country since 2019. A photo of a staff member burning books in front of a library had sparked heated debate and concern on the Internet.
Earlier this month, the Ministry of Education ordered libraries from kindergarten to high school to remove all books that might lead students to revere the West and replace them with books dedicated to “Xi Jinping’s thought. The Nikkei Asian Review recently cited analysis that all books deemed to be contrary to CCP policy and propaganda would be banned, such as Gulliver’s Travels, and religious books would be banned even more severely, and there are concerns that such strong control over books could extend from school libraries to society at large and bookstores.
Meanwhile, the Communist Party’s Ministry of Education put “Chinese Communist Party,” “socialism” and “Xi Jinping” at the forefront of its “Guidelines for Evaluating the Quality of Compulsory Education” released on March 1 In the “Quality Evaluation Guide for Compulsory Education” released on January 1, “Chinese Communist Party”, “socialism” and “Xi Jinping” are given the highest priority, and “the integration of ideological and political work into the whole process of school education and teaching” and “the transmission of the red gene” are listed as the first “quality evaluation indicators”.
The mainland media also reported that at the “Sina & Weibo 2021 International School Spring Tour” co-hosted by Sina Education, Weibo Education and Bozhi Education on April 18, executives of Shanghai Yijin Education Group said that international schools should join the culture classes of mainland ordinary high schools and that students “After completing the academic exams, they will receive a high school diploma from the system, take the national college entrance exam, and apply to China’s double-class universities”.
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