China's education minister on Friday ordered the country's colleges and universities to ban textbooks that promote "western values," a phrase that often refers to democracy and human rights.
Yuan Guiren told a higher education forum that Chinese institutions should take steps to protect their "political integrity," and "never let textbooks promoting western values appear in our classes," official media reported. Yuan also said higher education institutions should ban any negative comments about the ruling Communist Party from its classrooms.
"Remarks that slander the leadership of the Communist Party of China, smear socialism or violate the country's Constitution and laws must never appear or be promoted in college classrooms," Xinhua quoted him as saying.
| We do it a bit differently here in the USA. Substitute a different set of buzzwords, and you have PC as inflicted here in the USA instead of duck-speak in the PRC. |
| Good point, check out Dartmouth, Princeton, the Seven Sisters, and right on down to your local public university, etc... |
But a university professor who asked to remain anonymous said Yuan's comments were "nonsense" and harked back to the Mao era when China was shut off from the rest of the world.... "For the education minister to be saying such things is deeply embarrassing."
She added: "If we're going to reject all western ideologies, Marxism...much of modern science and even university education itself came from the West."
"According to Yuan Guiren, we should abolish universities, including the education ministry, and run private schools for the study of classical Chinese texts," she said.
"As we're traveling back 2,000 or 3,000 years, we could bring back foot-binding and speak in archaic Chinese." |