Omens for a Great Leap Backwards

WESTERN government and corporate leaders who have recently heard President Jiang Zemin and Premier Li Peng's spiel about Beijing's commitment to market reforms and Western norms should read the two circulars released by the leadership last week.

They are Certain Opinions on Further Strengthening and Improving Moral Education in Schools and Guidelines on the Implementation of Patriotic Education. The two documents, which were issued by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), have conjured up ghosts many think had been laid to rest by 15 years of reform.

They evoke Chairman Mao's belief in 'spiritual engineering' and 'permanent revolution', that human nature can be remoulded after decades of relentless indoctrination. Opinions and Guidelines also smack of the Maoist approach to utopia: whipping up mass enthusiasm and hysteria to expedite the Great Leap Forward to a New Heaven, New Earth.

The ostensible reason for this biggest ideological campaign of the 1990s is also a throwback to yesteryear: to counter the 'infiltration' of the evil West, those flies and mosquitoes spawned in the wake of the open door policy.

Opinions suggested that all schools boost moral and ideological classes to 'deeply and continually implement education in patriotism, collectivism and socialism'.

Unsurprisingly, the bogeys raised were 'Mammonism, hedonism and extreme individualism', as well as other strains of bourgeois liberalisation.