China teaches top cadres Western ideas despite backlash

Cadres make their way down tree-lined paths, through a polished lobby, down dim hallways and settle themselves in rows in plain, wood-panelled classrooms. Here, they sit at the vanguard of the Communist Party.

These rising party members have come to the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong (CELAP) in Shanghai as part of the party’s decade-long effort to introduce its elite to foreign ideas. Outside these walls, President Xi Jinping’s government is scrubbing Western influence from classrooms, but here some 10,000 party loyalists each year hear from top Western scholars about management techniques, media relations, development and innovation.

“It does no harm for top leaders to get to know different ideas in the world,” said Zhang Xuezhong, who was barred from teaching at East China University of Political Science and Law in 2013, after publishing an article critical of the government. “The Communist Party expects the people it rules to be ignorant, but they would not expect themselves to be like this.”

As the country seeks to play a more decisive role on the global stage, such exposure is becoming more important – at least for those at the forefront of transforming China’s economy and international role. For everyone else, education has become an ideological battleground, where destabilising Western values must be vanquished.

“Young teachers and students are key targets of infiltration by enemy forces,” Education Minister Yuan Guiren wrote in a January essay. Around the same time, he told university officials to bar “teaching materials that disseminate Western values”.

His remarks came shortly after Beijing ordered universities to promote loyalty to the party, core socialist values, and the teachings of Xi himself.