China's Chains

To any young rice farmer listening last week to the town radio in rural China, the news should have sounded welcome. "Starting this month," said the announcer, "Radio Peking will feature a nightly correspondence course for workers and farmers." Students would have to pay for their own books, continued the announcer, but "with diligence, everyone who completes the course in the next three or four years will be given an opportunity to compete in college entrance examinations anywhere in China."

This was Peking's latest educational sop for its people. From such bits of evidence, as well as from official reports and those of foreign visitors, U.S. and Japanese intelligence agencies have been piecing together a picture of what has happened to Mao Tse-tung's great promise to give his country universal education. The picture now seems clear.

Red China has cast off all pretense that it sets much value on extending universal education or preserving the country's cultural heritage. Ancient operas have been rewritten along Marxist lines; the nation's scholars are being silenced. The government's main objective now is to turn out 60,000 to 70,000 technical specialists a year. "China's intellectuals," reports French Correspondent Robert Guillian of Le Monde, just returned from China, "are frightened and subservient, half scared out of their wits. They are men in a deep malaise."

Directive No. 569673. As the demand for unskilled labor in factories and on farms has increased during the last two years, Peking has retreated steadily from any idea of expanding the regular school system. Said Minister of Education Chang Hsi-jo: "Mass industrialization comes before mass education."

Since 1954, it has been the Ministry's curious task to assure the youth of Red China that education really is not so important after all. Last month it issued Directive No. 569673 to guide teachers in sending their pupils off as farm laborers with the "correct" attitude. "It does not matter," said the directive, "whether you leave school now and go to work, or stay in school a while longer and work afterwards. What counts is what you are doing for the fatherland." In short: get to work. The People's Daily dutifully chimed in with a call for educating "students' parents in the glory of labor." Radio Peking added soothingly: "Many comrades in the rank and file of our revolutionary columns had no prior school education."

Forward, Technology. About the only phase of education that in any way lives up to Mao's original promises is technology. The liberal arts colleges have disappeared, and China's 201 universities have been turned into 182 science and engineering schools. Some of these teach only one subject. Peking's Fu Jen University, once run by Roman Catholics, teaches only biology. One medical school specializes only in diseases of North

China. Elsewhere, the range is even narrower. Students may spend two or three years in studying the engineering of one particular dam or the irrigation problems of one particular area.

Almost all technical textbooks are translations from the Russian. Of the 15,000 traditional Chinese texts handled before 1949 by the giant Commercial Press, only 1,234 are now considered "ideologically suitable." Traditional subject matter has similarly disappeared from the curriculum. Though the once-famed Peking University offers 300 courses, all but six are related to science and engineering. Of the 96,200 students selected last year for higher education, 50,000 were assigned to engineering, 28,500 to agriculture, medicine or physical culture, only 4% to either art or literature.

So far, the prestige of the intellectuals has been strong enough to stave off any attempt at mass annihilation. The government's policy has been rather to pick off the remaining recalcitrants one by one. The policy seems to be working only too well. "It's a steamroller," says Correspondent Guillian, "so heavy no man can escape the crush." Concluded Frank Moraes of the Times of India after a tour of China: "For the first time I realized what for many years I had sensed vaguely but never grasped. To have your body imprisoned behind prison walls is degrading. But to have your mind captive with invisible chains is far more degrading. In the democratic beholder such a spectacle creates a pain and nausea difficult to describe or overcome."

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