Overzealous Chinese officials 'could ban all foreign books', scholar fears

A literature scholar fears overzealous local education officials could ban all foreign textbooks after a call by the education minister for tougher ideological controls.

"Once the top official speaks, local officials in charge of implementing his directives often get carried away" trying to impress their superiors, Wang Benchao, dean of Southwest University's school of literature, said. This could lead them to implement a blanket ban on all foreign textbooks, he warned.

Wang, speaking on Wednesday on the sidelines of an education discussion during the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, was referring to comments made in January by Education Minister Yuan Guiren. Yuan had called on universities to purge classrooms of foreign textbooks that "spread Western values".

But officials were not experts in all subjects, and might be tempted to implement an oversimplified, blanket ban, he said.

"They would seclude our classrooms [from the outside world] by doing so."

Wang admitted it would be better for social science students to focus on Chinese theories rather than Western classics such as John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, until they could recognise "how biased" such theories were.