BEIJING — They are out there, hiding in library stacks, whispering in lecture halls, armed with dangerous textbooks and subversive pop quizzes: foreign enemies plotting a stealthy academic invasion of Chinese universities.
So says China’s education minister, Yuan Guiren, who has been issuing dire alarms about the threat of foreign ideas on the nation’s college campuses, calling for a ban on textbooks that promote Western values and forbidding criticism of the Communist Party’s leadership in the classroom.
“Young teachers and students are key targets of infiltration by enemy forces,” he wrote on Feb. 2 in the elite party journal “Seeking Truth,” explaining that “some countries,” fearful of China’s rise, “have stepped up infiltration in more discreet and diverse ways.”
But the government’s latest attempts to tighten controls over the nation’s intellectual discourse have raised concerns — and elicited rare open criticism — among teachers and students who reject the idea that foreign pedagogy and textbooks pose a threat to the government’s survival. Indeed, they note, one of the most vocal arguments against such controls came from the education minister himself.
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“Chinese universities are universities with socialist quality, so of course we should stick to socialist education,” it said on the school’s website.
Yet when asked about the presence of hostile foreign forces on campus, several students said they had seen nothing to raise suspicion.
Jimmy Bai, 23, acknowledged using foreign textbooks in the university’s journalism graduate program but said he had encountered nothing subversive. “As a regular college student,” he said, “I haven’t noticed anything.”
Chen Jiehao, Jess Macy Yu and Becky Davis contributed research.
