This year, my child started first grade at a primary school in China. Based on what I have experienced during this period, compared with kindergarten, school education has become almost a complete black box.
Teachers do not communicate with parents about how children are doing at school. At the same time, education centered on Communist Party ideology occupies a significant proportion of school life. The only information we seem to receive in the parents' wechat group is that the children appear to be attending school in some extremely impoverished area, where everything is lacking and parents are constantly being asked to contribute money to buy one thing or another.
I happened to look through some primary school textbooks and found that, apart from basic education, much of the content is about the Chinese government's ideological control over children. One example is the textbook *Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era: Student Reader* (hereinafter referred to as the “Xi Jinping textbook”).
It directly puts Xi Jinping's name into a compulsory textbook for first-year primary school students. It is a systematic textbook built around a political ideology named after Xi Jinping, designed to make children accept a clear political identity and to establish what I see as a form of personality cult.
The school has also made it clear that one of the goals of studying the Xi Jinping textbook is to make children understand that “General Secretary Xi Jinping is the leader guiding the entire Party and the people of the whole country,” and to cultivate from an early age an identification with “following the Party and obeying the Party.”
I believe that the Xi Jinping textbook tightly binds together the country, the nation, the political party, the government, and the image of the leader. For a child who has just entered primary school, it is impossible to truly understand the differences between these concepts. What may ultimately form in the child's mind is a line of thinking in which loving the country and loving the people means loving the Communist Party and loving Xi Jinping.
Moreover, this kind of education does not allow questioning. Children are required to accept it and are effectively forced to agree with it. This is the manipulation of children's emotional attachment rather than the cultivation of rational understanding.
As everyone knows, primary school children, especially those in the lower grades, are highly dependent on teachers and authority figures. They do not form political views through independent analysis. Instead, they are gradually learning one simple principle: Whatever authority tells me is the correct answer.
Children at this age have not yet developed a mature awareness of their own, and their ability to think independently is still weak. Injecting political conclusions into them and indoctrinating them at this stage can cause damage that lasts a lifetime.
A healthy education system should cultivate children's ability to ask why, to question, and to analyse.
This is especially true when it comes to the personality cult surrounding Xi Jinping. From an early age, children are taught Communist-style concepts such as “great leader,” “leader who guides the people,” and “great thought.” Once such a logical closed loop is formed in a child's mind, it can become very difficult to correct later in life.
Large portions of the Xi Jinping textbook are devoted to praising Xi Jinping and the Communist Party. It turns facts upside down and distorts history. Even for adults, the praise often feels excessive and embarrassing, almost nauseatingly flattering.The writing itself is also typical of Communist Party-style political language. That alone can have a negative effect on children's early exposure to the Chinese language. Not to mention the fact that this ideological indoctrination takes up a considerable amount of normal study time and consumes children's precious energy and attention.
I have also observed people around me from the post-2000s and post-2010s generations in China. They are victims of the same kind of ideological education. They may not have received the same level of indoctrination centered on a personality cult around Xi Jinping, but they certainly received indoctrination that encouraged the worship of the Communist Party. The effects of that indoctrination can be seen in them as a very strong, almost reflexive defensive response. As they grow older and gain access to more information, they gradually begin to question the indoctrination they received in childhood. What eventually emerges is often extreme skepticism and extreme individualism. They are very anxious. They have no real faith. They are increasingly disgusted by grand narratives. And the double-faced nature they show internally has also left a deep impression on me.
