“For years, China’s leaders have feared that they’re losing their grip on the ideological loyalty of the country’s youth. According to official rhetoric, the forces wresting away young minds are cultural warfare waged through alluring foreign pop culture and the infiltration of “Western values.”
In late 2013, China established a national security committee to focus on “unconventional security threats,” including Western culture. A senior colonel working with the committee said that Hollywood movies were dangerously altering the thinking and values of China’s youth.
President Xi Jinping gave his first signal that higher education would be a key battleground in this struggle. “University Communist Party organs must adopt firmer and stronger measures to maintain harmony and stability in universities,” he reportedly told a meeting of university Communist Party officials. “Young teachers have many interactions with students and cast significant [political and moral] influence on them. . . They also play a very important role in the spread of ideas.”
“This is big and dark,” Minzner said. “This is several years in the making and it will likely roll out in colleges over the next several years. We don’t know how far it will go.”
Relating to that, I have sometimes wondered whether recent government policies to lower the number of foreign students & graduates in the UK might backfire by degrading UK-Chinese relations in the long run.
There are ~100k Chinese students in the UK, which presumably translates to a flow of ~30k per year. Although small compared to China’s population, reducing that flow might eventually have some impact on how the Chinese and UK states relate to each other, since those students are relatively likely to be China’s movers & shakers of tomorrow, and relatively likely to have some Western Liberal Democratic Values™ rub off on them.
Why’s Beijing So Worried About Western Values Infecting China’s Youth?
https://www.chinafile.com/features/whys-beijing-so-worried-about-western-values-infecting-chinas-youth
“For years, China’s leaders have feared that they’re losing their grip on the ideological loyalty of the country’s youth. According to official rhetoric, the forces wresting away young minds are cultural warfare waged through alluring foreign pop culture and the infiltration of “Western values.”
In late 2013, China established a national security committee to focus on “unconventional security threats,” including Western culture. A senior colonel working with the committee said that Hollywood movies were dangerously altering the thinking and values of China’s youth.
President Xi Jinping gave his first signal that higher education would be a key battleground in this struggle. “University Communist Party organs must adopt firmer and stronger measures to maintain harmony and stability in universities,” he reportedly told a meeting of university Communist Party officials. “Young teachers have many interactions with students and cast significant [political and moral] influence on them. . . They also play a very important role in the spread of ideas.” “This is big and dark,” Minzner said. “This is several years in the making and it will likely roll out in colleges over the next several years. We don’t know how far it will go.”
and http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/13924/china-s-post-1980s-generation-between-the-nation-and-the-world
Relating to that, I have sometimes wondered whether recent government policies to lower the number of foreign students & graduates in the UK might backfire by degrading UK-Chinese relations in the long run.
There are ~100k Chinese students in the UK, which presumably translates to a flow of ~30k per year. Although small compared to China’s population, reducing that flow might eventually have some impact on how the Chinese and UK states relate to each other, since those students are relatively likely to be China’s movers & shakers of tomorrow, and relatively likely to have some Western Liberal Democratic Values™ rub off on them.