Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  I gazed at the baby-faced teen who sipped coffee before me. He wore an Adidas tracksuit and Nike cross trainers, apparently the costume of today’s budding Communist leader. “Do you believe everything you wrote here?” I asked, fingering the paper.

  Darcy paused. “Yes, I believe,” he said, and nodded, wall of bangs moving with his head.

  As we became better acquainted, Darcy’s House of Communist crumbled under scrutiny. Much of what I’ve written is official guanfang—gobbledygook, Darcy told me once, in a whisper. “Just stuff I have to do,” he said. “It’s what you need to do to get ahead.” His ultimate goal was outside the reach of the Party and off the trail of the red road: graduate school at the University of Michigan.

  “You want to study abroad?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said, and nodded, as a worrisome thought suddenly entered his brain.

  “If I want to study in America, will they care if I’m a Communist?” he asked me, head bowed but eyes fixed on mine, waiting for an answer.

  I realized that the face my friend presented to the world flipped and flopped depending on the audience and the purpose at hand. But one thing was clear: As an ambitious child of migrants, Darcy would join the Party because it ensured a brighter future inside Chinese borders. Membership opened up a new world of perks: eligibility for scholarships, the networks to find good jobs, positions at state-owned enterprises. Party membership is required for promotion in many government and university jobs.

  Darcy was among China’s best and brightest, and these were things he simply had to do. As I pondered the futures of my two Chinese student friends, I realized they were set for sharply divergent paths.

  Whereas Amanda’s year abroad would pave the way for college overseas, Darcy must navigate Chinese society the best he could.

  * * *

  When I thought about Darcy’s situation, I realized most Chinese present public faces that are very different from their private thoughts. To me this state of affairs seemed particularly problematic for China’s youngest generation.

  As an American, the self I offered to the outside world and the one I paraded around in the privacy of my apartment were mostly one and the same. Sure, a fully functioning member of any society must follow its spoken and unspoken rules, but for the most part, I could offer any thought I wanted for all to see.

  Darcy didn’t have that luxury. When I looked a little bit deeper into this issue, I discovered I wasn’t the only one who worried: A handful of brave Chinese scholars criticized China’s moral education curriculum for this very reason, assigning the Party’s heavy hand a losing proposition and a failing letter grade.

  Here’s the problem: A huge gap exists between what kids are taught in school (government provides for you) and what they see happening in real life (government officials taking privileges for themselves). There’s an immense gulf between what people say they believe (“Long Live the Communists”) and what desires they harbor in their personal lives (“Capitalism affords me opportunity, and a decent pair of Nikes”).

  China’s speeding economic change has shaken the socialist values upon which the Party was founded. Capitalism abounds, and spending hours in the classroom trying to convince students otherwise has become “unconvincing and unreliable in many respects,” writes the moral education scholar Li Maosen. The Party’s attempts at moral education have simply become a “means of political indoctrination for the purpose of ruling the people rather than for the development of the individual person.” The public intellectual Ran Yunfei derides a society “where the educational materials are all about loving the Party—of course it leads to a spiritual crisis,” he told the New York Review of Books.

  China is growing a nation of patriots who worship the Party in public but cultivate alternative thoughts in private.

  Take the models that the Communists put forth as heroes. Darcy and Amanda, having gone through nearly two decades of a public Chinese education, could rattle off their names and stories without pause: Lai Ning was a fourteen-year-old student who perished while assisting firefighters in tackling a blaze in Sichuan province. He was remembered as a standoffish yet studious schoolboy, but after his death, the state declared him a selfless, national hero. Huang Jiguang used his own body to block enemy bullets while struggling bravely for the Chinese during the Korean War. Soldier Dong Cunrui fought for the Communists in 1948, and he detonated explosives to clear a bunker. “For a new China!” he yelled, as the story goes, just before sacrificing himself with the act. Disseminated through the curriculum and presented in class, these models are almost always People’s Liberation Army soldiers or devotees who exhibited extraordinary devotion to Mao Zedong, Party elders, or the greater good.

  Most Chinese today believe their stories are out of touch with reality. And it’s no surprise that any tale encouraging a generation of precious, only children to self-sacrifice might not sit well with parents.

  In private, families have their own interpretations. A girlfriend put her two girls in public school in Guangdong. One week the young students were told the story of a man who carried a Chinese flag with pride but who was also slowly starving to death in the hot sun. One day he encountered a potential savior: a passerby with a loaf of bread.

  “I’ll trade you this loaf of bread for that flag,” the passerby said.

  “No,” replied the starving flag-bearer, despite the hunger in his stomach and the weakness in his limbs.

  “How about ten loaves for the flag?”

  “Still, no,” said the flag-bearer.

  As the story goes, the man died of starvation, holding the flag upright as long as he could bear it. The teacher would then echo the moral of the story: “How brave the man was!”

  My friend was horrified. “I try to combat the brainwashing at home,” she told me. “I teach my kids to take the bread! Right, girls?” she said, looking over at them during brunch at our home. “What do we choose instead of the flag?”

  “The bread!” both girls, ages six and nine, answered in unison.

  * * *

  The tension between ideology and reality was on full display when I visited a high school political science class, curious to understand whether Chinese students recognized the Party’s efforts to indoctrinate them.

  “You are the future owners of this country,” Teacher Qiu told her thirty-two Shanghai high school students. “You are the future of the motherland, and our hope. If you travel down the wrong path, you all lead our country to nowhere.”

  I’d slipped into the classroom and sat in the back, invited to observe by the principal, who was acquainted with my research assistant. The students were parked in pairs at metal desks, which were in turn grouped into three columns, running from the chalkboard to the back of the room. I’d always been struck by the inside of the Chinese classroom: daylight glaring through single-paned windows, lone circular fan descending from a high plaster ceiling, green chalkboard cleaned by students during break, the etchings of the previous day’s instruction still faintly detectable. It felt more like a barracks than a classroom.

  Mounted on the front wall was the Chinese flag, and the students sat attentively.

  “Now, let’s talk about the civil service exam,” Teacher Qiu said. “Please speak your thoughts. Why do thousands of people try to get onto that boat of civil service jobs?”

  “Because civil service jobs are an iron bowl—a secured job.”

  “A gold bowl,” another student exclaimed. “A super-secured job.”

  “Money!” chimed in one student, a shudder passing through her shoulders. It was wintertime. The students wore heavy red-and-gray coats over their uniforms—public schools don’t usually have heat—and shivered over their textbooks.

  “Not much money but good stability! Good welfare!” another echoed.

  Another boy chimed in, his voice low and husky. “They can also embezzle.”

  “Embezzlement?” Teacher Qiu repeated, echoing my surprise. In recent years, foreign
investigative journalists had uncovered billions of assets sitting in accounts and shell companies held by family members of sitting Communist leaders. It was money derived from business contacts, resulting directly from a connection to power. This was an open secret, but I hadn’t expected students to feel comfortable openly questioning Party leaders in a classroom.

  Teacher Qiu looked at the boy, who rephrased. “To put it more mildly, to earn extra money,” he said.

  “Don’t babble,” Qiu admonished, nodding toward me, where I sat at the back of the room. “You are embarrassing the teacher who is sitting in the class.” It was a gentle reminder that outsiders sat in the room: Don’t pull back the curtain too far.

  The teacher tried to redirect. “Public servants are just like us. Anyone can take the exam and become a public servant, fulfill their obligations, and enjoy the security provided by the state. They are not to be envied.”

  To be quite honest, I wasn’t sure who was more skeptical of her statement: the teacher or the students. Chinese society has become a brutal, dog-eat-dog environment where everyone is obsessed with getting ahead; in such a competitive environment, a lecture about serving the state rings hollow.

  A different student spoke. “Public servants,” he announced, “become the privileged class, which contradicts their role as people’s servants.”

  The boy was right to criticize. A financial and ethical morass—assisted by a lack of transparency or due process in government—had cast a shadow on China’s government dealings at nearly every level. The Western equivalent of the Chinese central government corruption recently uncovered might be a skyscraper sitting in the name of the UK prime minister’s cousin, or the discovery that a US president’s mother owned stakes in insurance companies worth $800 million—despite the fact that neither the cousin nor the mother worked in real estate or insurance. When this happens in China, the people have no recourse.

  The teacher challenged the student. “Most public servants have no privileges. Most adhere to proper procedure—in proper order. For example, when we get up in the morning, we must first wash our faces and then brush our teeth, and then can we go eat breakfast.”

  “But some eat breakfast first,” another student chimed in. I imagined this was his euphemism for officials who embezzle public funds or leverage power inappropriately.

  “Sure, some eat breakfast first,” Teacher Qiu said, trying to steer the conversation back on track. “Then they wash their faces and brush their teeth.”

  “Your example is not appropriate,” the student countered.

  “Do you have other examples?” the teacher asked, glancing my way. “What kind of behaviors require a certain order? For instance, handing in homework?”

  “Assembly lines in a capitalist society,” the student responded. This was also a challenge. Capitalism is a no-no; the official Party line for China’s system is “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

  “What kind of assembly line—in what kind of order?” Teacher Qiu posed, working again to redirect.

  The student responded with a chant. “Long live Communism, and long live the Communist Party.” He chortled, and the whole class tittered.

  “You shouted out a slogan,” Teacher Qiu said. The student offered another one, the sarcasm drowning his voice. This time, he used the slang for President Xi Jinping.

  “Xi Da Da is a good person.”

  * * *

  In private, Teacher Qiu spoke of a simpler time, hands folded in her lap.

  Public servants used to inspire the admiration of students, Qiu told me, class dismissed, the nostalgia of another era softening her voice. “This admiration was unequivocal. Today, students challenge the notion that ‘domestic shame should be kept hidden.’”

  And China’s leadership prefers ‘domestic shame’ buried under ten feet of Yunnanese soil, preferably frozen solid to deter ice picks and shovels. Civil servants such as Teacher Qiu are expected to be infantrymen in the effort to keep the populace in line.

  Qiu longed for another era, but a lanky, charismatic history teacher I met in Beijing was more than content to sweep burgeoning sentiments of dissent under a rug. Teacher Kang never questioned the boundaries of what can be discussed in the classroom.

  “Every Chinese knows what can be said in class and what cannot,” Kang boomed. I’d met him at an education conference in Beijing, and he agreed to talk with me about moral education. We’d bantered for about an hour about theories of civil education before he began to open up.

  “Is there an instruction manual to what can’t be said?” I asked Teacher Kang, half joking.

  “There’s nothing clearly written,” Kang responded, although a 2013 central government document was explicit: It banned discussion of democracy, freedom of speech, and past mistakes of the Communist Party.

  “Then how do you know?” I asked.

  “I just know it,” Kang continued, matter-of-factly. “Nothing is mingwen—explicitly stated.”

  I pressed. “What, for example? What can’t you say in class?”

  Kang rattled off a list. “You should not mention Falun Gong. You should especially not mention Falun Gong. That’s more sensitive than the June Fourth incident. Also the Islam problem.” Falun Gong is a Buddhist spiritual practice deemed a threat to social stability, and “the June Fourth incident” is shorthand for the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre, in which Beijing sent tens of thousands of troops to crack down on a student pro-democracy demonstration. The “Islam problem” refers to Muslim separatists in Xinjiang and their perceived threat to the Chinese Han majority ethnic group.

  “It is possible to criticize the government?” I asked Kang.

  Kang thought for a little bit. “I can’t give you a simple yes or no answer, it depends. You can discuss a specific problem of government, such as Beijing’s terrible urban planning, our traffic jams, and awful public service.”

  “What about corruption?”

  “Corruption can be discussed. This is no problem,” Kang affirmed.

  “Are you sure?” I said. This was surprising to me, but it explained what I saw in that political class.

  Kang clarified. “You cannot challenge the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. This you should avoid. But you can discuss the causation of corruption—for example, the lack of checks and balances of power.”

  “How do you know where the line is drawn?”

  At this, he laughed heartily, his head jolting to the right. “I am Chinese. I know. History tells you this. The Cultural Revolution was a dark time and China learned its lesson.” This was Mao Zedong’s ill-fated attempt to purge capitalist and traditional thought from Chinese society and to reinstall Maoism as a central philosophy, a campaign that resulted in the persecution of millions.

  A Harvard-based researcher backed up Kang’s assertions about speech; Gary King analyzed nearly eleven million social media posts and found that it’s a call to action—rather than language—that Beijing is most interested in suppressing. “Words alone are permitted, no matter how critical and vitriolic,” the researchers wrote. “But mere mentions of collective action—of any large gathering not sponsored by the state, whether peaceful or in protest—are censored immediately.”

  Recently, President Xi Jinping has tightened his grip on academic freedom—an action one scholar likened to a “minor cultural revolution”—and also tapered the channels that bring the content of Western curricula into China at all levels of schooling.

  I asked Teacher Kang about the Party’s increasingly heavy hand.

  “Setbacks are inevitable,” he admitted, but he also said that an authoritarian government is necessary for China in this stage of development. “A civil society hasn’t yet formed. It’s not rational to build a democracy for China, simply because a democracy is more advanced.”

  My Chinese student friend Darcy, in fact, believed a two-party system was patently inefficient. “With one party, policies can be implemented,” he said, with a firm nod
. “In America, if the Democrats wanted to ban guns, the whole nation would ban guns. But because Republicans object, it’s hard to enforce. In China, there’s only one party. They can do what they want immediately.” During other conversations, Darcy had hinted at differences between his public and private faces, but on the benefits of a one-party system, he seemed patently certain.

  Amanda had a similarly practical approach. As a lead student organizer for a Model United Nations conference in China, she’d been told certain topics could not be discussed: “Taiwan and Tibet, the election in Hong Kong, race in South Africa, and the conflict between Iran and Israel. Our director tells us what we can’t talk about.”

  I was flabbergasted. I expected outrage, or at least a little bit of displeasure at the fact that Amanda was told what she couldn’t discuss. “So—the purpose of Model UN is to encourage freethinking among the next generation of young leaders,” I challenged her. “You’re telling me about outright censorship of debate topics, inside an event whose purpose is to . . . debate world issues!”

  Amanda shrugged me off. “We cannot afford to care about censorship—that’s a Western luxury. You forget that China is still a developing country and we are still focusing on making sure we have food, housing, and education.”

  As she saw the incredulity growing in my eyes, Amanda put me in check with an observation gleaned from her year in the United States. “Americans have this illusion of freedom and democracy,” she told me, “but it was the Founding Fathers who created the Constitution. An elite group controlled by a minority.”

  Good point.

  “America is not truly a democracy—it’s elitism,” she declared. “By telling people it’s a democracy, it gives people an illusion that there’s hope. That’s the difference between Chinese and Americans—the Chinese are devoid of real hope, so they just concentrate on their personal issues.”