Among the 16 points formulated by the Communist Party Central Committee to guide the Cultural Revolution is the following declaration:
In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution a most important task is to transform the old educational system and the old principles and methods of teaching. In this Great Cultural Revolution the phenomenon of our schools being dominated by bourgeois intellectuals must be completely changed.
Schools and universities became the first major battleground in the Cultural Revolution, with university and high school students quickly forming Red Guard brigades and struggling against many of their administrators to transform education. The many basic changes made in education were outlined in an article in Peking Review #10, 1976, called “Fundamental Differences Between the Two Lines in Education” which was used widely to counter the Right deviationist wind in educational circles last year. It talks about the changes made in agricultural colleges since the Cultural Revolution but applies to all schools. Quoted below are the subtitles from the article; the entire article should be read to get a better understanding.
1. Old agricultural colleges were dominated by bourgeois intellectuals, new agricultural colleges must strengthen working class leadership.
2. Old agricultural colleges were concentrated in cities; new agricultural colleges are scattered in the countryside.
3. Old agricultural colleges advocated: ’He who excels in learning can be an official.’ New agricultural colleges practice the system: ’From the communes and back to communes’ and train new type peasants with both socialist consciousness and culture.
4. Old agricultural colleges stressed: ’Giving first place to intellectual development.’ New agricultural colleges stress putting proletarian politics in command!
5. Old agricultural colleges advocated ’regularization’. New agricultural colleges adhere to part work, part study systems.
6. Old agricultural colleges stressed a teaching process centered around teachers, books, and classrooms and based on basic theory, basic principle of various specialties and specialized courses. New agricultural colleges conduct teaching on the basis of scientific research and production (integrating study and production, theory and practice).
7. Old agricultural colleges were housed in buildings and isolated from society; new agricultural colleges are closely linked with the three great revolutionary movements – the struggle for production, the class struggle, and scientific experiment, [note: shortening the length of education is emphasized here]
8. Old agricultural colleges were ’pagodas’ for a privileged few. New agricultural colleges spread out on an ever widening scale, reaching to the grass roots and providing education for the masses.
9. Old agricultural colleges enslaved the students; new agricultural colleges enable worker-peasant-soldier students to ’attend the university, manage it and transform it’.
10. Teachers in old agricultural colleges were divorced from workers and peasants; new agricultural colleges help teachers integrate with workers and peasants and strive to build a contingent of proletarian teachers.
In the next issue of Peking Review (#11, 1976, p. 6) the two-line struggle in education is further defined:
To transform schools into instruments of the dictatorship of the proletariat for training successors to the proletarian revolutionary cause or to turn them into instruments of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie for training intellectual aristocrats to restore capitalism is a fundamental issue in the two-line struggle on the educational front.
Among the first and most important battlegrounds of the Cultural Revolution in the educational front were Tsinghua and Peking Universities. Since then these universities have been heralded as outstanding examples of how socialist new things are put into practice in education. They were also principal fronts in the struggle to beat back the Right deviationist wind in education during 1975 and 1976. In November, 1975, Chairman Mao personally went to Tsinghua University to launch a mass debate to criticize this bourgeois wind. The debate was led by the Party and the Workers’ Propaganda Team in the University and soon spread to other schools around the country. We present here parts of three articles that dealt with this struggle:
Around last summer (1975) a Right deviationist wind trying to reverse previous correct verdicts was whipped up in society at large. Its aim was to negate the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution personally initiated and led by Chairman Mao ten years ago and the socialist new things that have emerged during the Cultural Revolution. It was at this time that a few persons at Tsinghua University, bent on pushing the revisionist line, came out with attacks on Chairman Mao’s proletarian revolutionary line and the Party Central Committee he headed. With penetrating insight into the current trend in class struggle, our great leader Chairman Mao promptly seized hold of this opportunity and personally initiated a revolutionary mass debate. Under the leadership of the Party organizations, the cadres and masses at Tsinghua University began exposing and criticizing revisionism.
This struggle is neither isolated nor accidental . . Those who whipped up the Right deviationist wind were in fact launching a wild all-round offensive against the proletariat politically, ideologically, and organizationally. They attempted to change the Party’s basic line, thereby turning the whole country away from its M-L orientation and changing its political colour. The worker-peasant-soldier students hit the nail on the head when they said: ’If this Right deviationist wind to reverse correct verdicts should succeed, capitalism would be restored in China and millions of our class brothers would lose their lives.’
Immediately after the revolutionary mass debate started, some Tsinghua students put up a big-character poster: ’The capitalist-roaders are still on the capitalist road.” It directed the spearhead of this struggle at a handful of capitalist-roaders in the Party. With the deepening of the mass debate, the class alignment became clearer and clearer. The bourgeois representatives who whipped up the Right deviationist wind were mainly those capitalist-roaders who were exposed and criticized during the Cultural Revolution but refused to mend their ways. A case in point was the way a group of worker-peasant-soldier students of the industrial automation department criticized those who whipped up the Right deviationist wind and alleged that the ’poor standard’ of the students was hampering the four modernizations [agriculture, industry, national defense and science and technology] They wrote a big-character poster entitled: ’Are those who whipped up the Right deviationist wind for modernization or restoration?’ Citing numerous facts to show that it isn’t students but these people who are hampering the ’four modernizations’, they pointed out: the bourgeoisie only pretends not to talk about class struggle, their aim being to lull the masses of people and oppose the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. . Those who whipped up the Right deviationist wind used the ’four modernizations’ as a big club to smash the socialist new things and attack the proletariat. Owing to the existence of bourgeois right and old traditional ideas, we are constantly exposed to attacks by germs of the old society. This makes some of the cadres and masses liable to fall prey to the Right deviationist wind. The aim of the present mass debate is to temper the people in the course of struggle, deepen their understanding of the social origins of revision ism and reduce the grounds of revisionism to the minimum. (PR #12, pp. 9,10,11)
Tsinghua University was the first to launch counter-attacks early last November, Making use of the forms of speaking out freely, airing views fully, writing big-character posters and holding great debates, the teachers, students, staff membei and workers have exposed and criticized the fallacies spread by the capitalist-roaders in the Party. They have done this by presenting facts and reasoning things out. Peking University and other institutions of education, science and technology soon followed suit and launched a fierce counter-attack against all the absurdities that had cropped up in educational, scientific, and technological circles. (PR #12, 1976, p. 11)
In order to throw the workers out of the schools, Teng Hsiao-ping did his utmost to vilify the excellent situation in the realm of the superstructure and attacked the educational revolution, alleging that there was a ’crisis’ in the educational departments. . He and his followers cried: ’The working class has made a mess of education.’ This, of course, was a distortion of the facts. .. In order to throw the workers out of the schools, Teng Hsiao-ping spread political rumors, instigating intellectuals to oppose working class leadership, defaming and attacking the Worker Propaganda Team stationed in Tsinghua University. .. (PR #37, 1976, pp. 19-20)
During the October, 1976, purge, the Minister of Education, Chou Hung-pao (who had replaced the Rightist Chou Jung-hsin last spring) and the Vice Minister of Education Chih Chun, who was also head of Tsinghua University, were arrested. The leaders of the worker propaganda teams that played an important role in transforming the universities since the Cultural Revolution and who were under attack last year by Teng (PR #3] p. 20) have been arrested at both Tsinghua and Peking Universities (N.Y. Times, Oct. 17) along with many teachers and students, not only at Peking and Tsinghua but at other colleges, schools and universities.
Chairman Mao said after the Cultural Revolution: “The worker propaganda teams should stay permanently in the schools and colleges, take part in all the tasks of struggle-criticism-transformation there and will always lead these institutions.” During the anti-Right struggle at Tsinghua University last year he said: “The question involved in Tsinghua is not an isolated question but a reflection of the current two-line struggle.” (PR #37, 1976, p. 20) These two instructions of Chairman Mao show us that the arrests are not a few isolated attacks on a few students, teachers, and political leaders, but an attack on the entire educational revolution begun in the Cultural Revolution.
The first mention of the struggle to beat back the Right deviationist wind in education in Peking Review since the purge was this passage (PR #4, 1977, p. 16) criticizing the “gang of four” for down-playing Chou En-lai in the news media:
Renmin Ribao (Peoples’ Daily) did not mention Premier Chou En-lai’s name that day (Jan. 14, 1976) but instead on Yao Wen-yuan’s orders (one of the ’gang of four’) carried a lengthy front page article, ’Big Changes Brought about by Big Debate at Tsinghua University.’ ’Of late,’ the article babbled, ’the whole nation has been following Tsinghua’s big debate on the educational revolution with interest.’ This was an outrageous flaunting of public sentiment and the meanest distortion of the feelings of the Party members and people at large as well.
The present leaders opposed the struggle against the Right deviationist trend in educational circles that was carried out last year, and in criticizing the “gang of four” are going all out to defend and develop that trend.
Typical of the bankrupt style of the criticism put forward by the new leaders was an article about education in Peking Review #8. 1977, the only one so far to appear in Peking Review since the purge. The authors twist the objectives of the struggle to beat back the Right deviationist wind in education as “opposing intellectual development and acquiring knowledge.” Echoing Teng Hsiao-ping, they claim that the “gang of four” set politics and socialist consciousness against culture and intellectual development so as to negate culture and intellectual development. With an awkward slight of hand they try to prove that the struggle to beat back the Right deviationist trend in education was “an attempt to stop the laboring people from acquiring knowledge. . a futile scheme to keep the workers and poor and lower middle peasants forever in a state of ignorance without culture.” Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. As the preceding articles have shown, education has been traditionally the domain of the bourgeois intellectuals and has excluded peasants and workers, and did to a large degree until the Cultural Revolution. The changes in education made during the Cultural Revolution were a tremendous victory for the working classes, but their success was dependent on a continual struggle to put them into practice, to challenge the bourgeois dominance over education, and prevent the old ideas and the bourgeois elements that continued to promote them from getting the upper hand.
Examinations have been a constant source of struggle since liberation and particularly since the Cultural Revolution began. Examinations are still necessary in education, but their use as the primary factor in admissions was defeated during the Cultural Revolution and replaced with a system of choosing outstanding members with high political consciousness from the communes and industrial enterprises. In their attempts to regain control over education, bourgeois intellectuals many times try to increase the role of academic examinations and exclude peasants and workers with less academic knowledge from colleges and universities. An article in PR #8 1977 (pp. 13-15) attacks the struggle of the worker-peasant-soldier students against the bourgeois use of examinations by defaming a hero of that movement, Chang Tieh-sheng of the Tiehling Agricultural College. Chang Tieh-sheng was a production brigade leader who in protest against entrance examinations that tried exclude peasants and workers turned in a blank exam. Now the present leaders attack him as a “concocted hero”, with a “hopelessly low [academic] level“ who couldn’t pass the exam and an all-around opportunist and pawn of the “gang of four”. What is their point? – to reverse the verdict on the use of academic entrance examinations as a means to exclude peasants and workers from school.[1]
The bourgeois idea of education is that it must be geared toward educating a technocratic elite instead of a large contingent of worker-soldier-peasant students to return to the communes and factories. This is consistent with their idea that technological advances depend on a few highly specialized elite technicians and not on the masses of workers and peasants. These bourgeois ideas manifest themselves in many ways such as emphasizing technique over political socialist education, emphasizing grades and tests, wanting to “raise academic standards,” by kicking the peasants and workers out of the schools, and opposing the authority of the worker propaganda teams, claiming that the most “intellectually advanced” professors (who many times did not take a strong class stand with the proletariat) must run the schools, that “non-professionals cannot direct professionals.” All these ideas were thoroughly repudiated during the Cultural Revolution, but they did not disappear, and Teng Hsiao-ping tried to stir up a Right deviationist wind to bring back these ideas and reverse the correct verdicts in the educational field. The bourgeois intellectuals who promoted this line said they wanted to “raise academic standards” and “further cultural development and scientific achievement,” but what they actually tried to do was push the workers and peasants out of the universities and schools. The result of their plan would have been to recreate schools that would be the privileged pagodas of the bourgeois intellectuals to train a new class of technocrats to restore capitalism.
To combat the bourgeois line and consolidate the schools as centers of working class education, political development, and technical advancement was the essence of the struggle to beat back the Right deviationist wind in education. The two-line struggle in education is defined and very powerfully presented in the movie “Breaking with Old Ideas,” which was produced in the spring of 1976 to support the struggle to beat back the Right deviationist trend at that time. All the movies produced during this time to attack capitalist-roaders have been denounced by the new leaders of China (see following section).
We also suggest that people examine closely two articles dealing with a related subject: “Repulsing the Right deviationist wind in the scientific and technological circles”, by the Mass Criticism Group at Peking and Tsinghua Universities, in PR #18, 1976 (p. 6) and “A serious struggle in scientific and technical circles”, by the theoretical group of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in PR #16, 1977 (p. 24). The two articles are totally opposed to each other, and the second is written to counter the message of the first. The first puts forward the proletarian revolutionary line in scientific and technological fields, carefully explains it, and defends it against attacks that were being made by the Right deviationists. Typical of many of the articles now written to attack the “gang of four,” the second article makes it clear that the persons and political line under attack last year for being revisionist and Right deviationist were in fact correct and their opponents incorrect; however, it sidesteps the most important principles brought up in the struggle, characterizing the whole thing as “bourgeois factionalism” and an attempt to seize power by the ”gang of four”.
[1] The N.Y. Times reported on March 28, 1977, that students in Peking were taking entrance exams for the first time in three years (since the struggle in which Chang Tieh-sheng was a leader).