War lessons for China’s ‘little red soldiers’: education or brainwashing?

China’s ruling Communist party promotes the 'patriotic education' at the Red Army schools, but critics condemn it as little more than brainwashing.

Children in China dressed in uniform sing after raising the national flag at the Beichuan Red army elementary school in Beichuan, southwest China's Sichuan province. Fred Dufour/AFP Photo

BEICHUAN, CHINA // In sky-blue army uniforms emblazoned with red stars, they could be Communist comrades from China’s civil war. But in fact the youngsters are the targets of a modern campaign for hearts and minds, with the classroom as its battleground.

“We are the new generation of little Red Army warriors,” the children sang, tunics and belts matching the ones donned by Mao Zedong’s troops when they marched across China.

“We march onwards with incomparable firmness.”

The Beichuan Red Army Elementary School’s anthem is taught alongside revolutionary history in an extreme example of the “patriotic education” which China’s ruling Communist party promotes to boost its legitimacy – but which critics condemn as little more than brainwashing.

Nearly 150 Red Army schools, funded by China’s “red nobility” of revolution-era Communist commanders and their families, have been established since 2007 throughout the country.

China has stepped up ideological education in recent decades, after a decline that followed Mao’s decade-long Cultural Revolution.

After the deadly 1989 crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square, China’s then-President Jiang Zemin called for a renewed focus on history in elementary schools and even kindergartens.

Zheng Wang, an expert at Seton Hall University said: “Its main aim is to increase the legitimacy of the party after the student movement and the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

He added that Xi Jinping, who took power in 2012, appeared to be “more enthusiastic” about the campaign than his predecessors.

The drive has been a bete-noire for Chinese liberals, who say it whitewashes the party’s often violent history and stokes nationalist fervour.

“In a sense, the Red Army elementary schools are a continuation of the Party’s efforts to fool ordinary people, and create slaves of the party,” said Li Xinai, an exiled author who has written critically about the scheme.

Sometimes bearing names of prominent party elders, the schools are built in “old revolutionary areas”, once cradles of Communist rebellion but still often among the country’s poorest areas.

The project is not directly affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army, but its dual aims are to “improve the backward educational conditions” in such areas, while “spreading the Red Army spirit”, according to its website.

Its founders are listed online as the wives of former top politician Li Ruihuan and Marshal He Long.

The wife of former leader Deng Xiaoping has donated 100,000 yuan (Dh58,800), while the current president’s mother Qi Xin contributed 150,000 yuan, according to the website.

The schools will “make great contributions to promoting the party’s history, and the education of youth through traditional revolutionary methods,” it said online.

The jagged hills of Beichuan county in Sichuan province once sheltered Communists retreating from Nationalist opponents in the 1930s.

They now echo with the voices of dozens of schoolchildren singing: “The red star sparkles. We will make the motherland stronger.”

Their tight formation disintegrated into an exuberant hullabaloo as the students rushed to class, skipping past framed images of Mao Zedong and his successor, current President Xi Jinping.

“Look at this picture of the Red Army in the marshlands,” said teacher Tang Jinping.

“What is your feeling about the older generations, and Grandpa Mao?” he asked his young charges.

Quick as a guerrilla fighter, a 12-year-old student raised his hand. “I feel the Red Army is very great,” the boy proclaimed. “We must study their revolutionary spirit!”

* Agence France-Presse