Photographer: Nicolas Asfouri / AFP / Getty Images
Photographer: Nicolas Asfouri / AFP / Getty Images
China’s schoolchildren are the next point to intensify the study of President Xi Jinping’s teachings ahead of the centennial celebration of the ruling Communist Party in July.
The party’s Central Committee on Wednesday issued new guidelines to promote ideological education among the Chinese Young Pioneers, a national youth organization to which it is affiliated. According to the guidelines, all children in the primary school and the first two years of the secondary school should have one class per week to carry out Young Pioneers activities, and the core training material for the teaching staff should think Xi.
Members of the Young Pioneers should be taught to ‘keep in mind the teachings of Xi’ and ‘do what Xi commanded’, according to the guidelines.
In China, everyone, from diplomats to executives to scientific writers, is under pressure to incorporate the broad, often nonsensical principles of ‘Xi Thought’ into their policies, part of an effort to increase it with Maoism and the president’s attempt to further consolidate. cement management.
Read more: The rise of ‘Xi Thought’ shows long future for one-man government in China
The document also urged the children to learn that a happy life of today ultimately comes from the correct leadership of the Party ‘as well as’ from the superiority of our socialist system’.
The strengthening of ‘political enlightenment and value formation’ among children is of strategic importance to ensure that the ‘red genes are passed down from generation to generation’, the People’s Daily said on its front page on Thursday, referring to the guidelines.
Another state-backed newspaper, the China Daily, cited the guidelines in a piece entitled ‘Cultivation of children as seen strategically’. The newspaper wrote that children are the future of the nation and the Communist Party, which has always made the culture of the country a ‘strategic’ and ‘fundamental’ task.
The Role of the Pioneers
The guidelines come when Xi visited a town in the southwestern province of Guizhou, which according to state media has successfully eradicated poverty. Xi took pictures with people of the Miao ethnic minority, dressed in traditional clothes, and Xi sent greetings to all Chinese people before the lunar new year, which falls on February 11 this year.
The Chinese Young Pioneers was founded in 1949 and includes almost all children in China between the ages of six and 14. It played an “irreplaceable role” in guiding generations of children to follow the party’s instructions, according to the guidelines.
Although it was unclear what his current membership was, the 2007 figure is about 130 million.
The guidelines also called for the promotion of exchanges between young pioneers on the continent and children’s organizations in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan to promote the ‘national, ethnic and cultural identity’ of the youth in these areas.
– With help by Colum Murphy and Jing Li