The following post by Hong Kong columnist Ko Waiyin (高慧然) about how protests against “national education” curriculum in Hong Kong are still going on despite the government backing down on plans to make the curriculum mandatory, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 9:21 p.m. yesterday, September 11, 2012. Ko currently has more than 20,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].

Hong Kong people are so worthy of pride!.

The post was a comment made to another post, not deleted as of 12:58 p.m. Wednesday, that reads: “It’s 33 degrees outside, and so many people! Protests are still going on.”
The original post shares an image of ongoing protests against “national education” in Hong Kong:

Why was Ko’s post deleted while the original post with a photograph of the protests was not? Possibly because while Ko has more than 20,000 followers, the original poster has less than 3,000.
Ko’s original Chinese-language post follows:

香港人，太值得驕傲！

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

By QIAN GANG
Keywords: The Four Basic Principles and Mao Zedong Thought (四项基本原则/毛泽东思想)
What political trends can we expect to unfold during the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, a once-in-a-decade leadership transition that will set the tone for China’s domestic political environment for years to come? Will political reform cower in the wings, barely visible? Or will it stride out to center stage?
Certainly, China’s political battles are complicated affairs, waged largely behind the scenes, backstage, between flesh-and-blood Party leaders with their own, competing agendas and ideological proclivities. But the language of China’s Party politics, the script that emerges as “consensus” from this backstage melee, can offer us important clues to emerging trends, as well as to the strength of regressive political impulses. China’s political script is rewritten every five years, taking shape in the “political report” delivered at each National Congress.
On the question of political reform, there is one important terminology in particular we should remain alert to if we hope to read, between the lines as it were, the larger political climate of the 18th National Congress: the “Four Basic Principles,” or sixiang jiben yuanze (四项基本原则).

[ABOVE: The site in Shanghai where the Party’s 1st National Congress was held in 1921, by Peter Verkhovensky posted to Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.]
If this term continues to appear in the political report to the 18th National Congress, it is possible to say with some certainty that, barring shifts of a more dramatic nature, there is little hope or expectation for substantive political reform. By the same token, a strong showing in the political report for this buzzword would signal an unfortunate turnabout, a backsliding, on the issue of political reform. But the vanishing of the term altogether would be the most important signpost for political reform.
So where does this term, the “Four Basic Principles,” come from? And what does it mean?
On March 30, 1979, Deng Xiaoping marked out the boundaries for a process of reform that had just begun. He said:

First, we must adhere to the socialist path; second, we must adhere to a dictatorship of the proletariat; third, we must adhere to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party; fourth, we must adhere to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping’s “Four Basic Principles” formed the very heart of China’s political orthodoxy. However, they later became the most effective tool by which those on China’s extreme political left opposed Deng’s policy of reform and opening. Deng Xiaoping’s political line in the 1980s was referred to also as the “third plenary political line” (established, that is, during the third plenary session of the 11th National Congress, held in 1978).

[ABOVE: A propaganda poster for the “Four Basic Principles” posted to China’s internet.]
In the ideological struggles that marked the first half of the 1980s, General Secretary Hu Yaobang, a strong advocate of economic and political reform, was sharply criticized by the chief proponents of the left for contravening the Four Basic Principles. Hu was eventually forced to resign his position as General Secretary, opponents claiming his light-handed approach had contributed to public demonstrations in 1987 calling for greater economic and political liberalization. Two years later, it was again the truncheon of the Four Basic Principles that leftists wielded to force the resignation of Hu Yaobang’s successor, Zhao Ziyang, in the aftermath of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Incident. As a result, Deng Xiaoping lost a capable ally.
Hu and Zhao were both conscientious actors for political reform. But as the veteran Xinhua News Agency reporter Yang Jisheng wrote in his chronicle of that time, Political Struggle in the Era of Reform: “The first issue to be resolved in terms of political reform is checks and balances on power. Checks and balances on power would mean upsetting the current leadership system. In both cases, the removal of these general secretaries was prompted by [the struggle over] political reform. In the conflict between the Four Basic Principles and political reform, there was no room at all for either of them to maneuver.”
These two terms, the “Four Basic Principles” and “political system reforms” – the more drawn out term in Chinese for political reform – were locked in fierce opposition throughout the 1980s. In the Party’s official mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, we can still glimpse the fossil evidence of this tension.

In 1988, when the political reform movement was reaching its zenith, the Four Basic Principles were in rapid retreat, as can be seen from the graph above, which plots occurrences of each term in the People’s Daily over time. In 1989 the situation was reversed. But we can also see that by the 1990s both terms were in decline, political reform bottoming out by 1990, and the Four Basic Principles joining it at the bottom in 1993, by which time the country was preoccupied with an unprecedented economic acceleration.
In China’s media today the Four Basic Principles occur with very low frequency. In the 10 years since President Hu Jintao came to power, the term has appeared in headlines in the People’s Daily on just three occasions – in 2004, 2007 and 2008.
The last instance came as the Party commemorated the 30th anniversary of China’s policy of economic reform and opening. The second instance came as the newspaper unpacked President Hu Jintao’s political report to the 17th National Congress of the CCP in 2007, in which he mentioned the Four Basic Principles.
But the most important case by far was the first one, in 2004. This was the handiwork of one of the most prominent members of China’s Maoist faction, Chen Kuiyuan (陈奎元), the head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Commemorating the centennial of Deng Xiaoping’s birth that year, on August 22, Chen Kuiyuan remarked: “The adherence to the Four Basic Principles is one of Deng Xiaoping’s greatest contributions to the socialist cause.” In a clever stroke of leftist spin, Chen was suggesting that the greatest legacy of the man who has been called the architect of China’s economic rise, was not reform, but in fact the political orthodoxy of the Four Basic Principles.

[ABOVE: The People’s Daily runs an article by Chen Kuiyuan in which he says the Four Basic Principles were Deng Xiaoping’s greatest contribution to the socialist cause.]
Here is how the term Four Basic Principles has played out in successive political reports from the 11th National Congress in 1977 to the 17th National Congress in 2007:

The 13th National Congress in 1987 was the meeting at which political reform became a part of the agenda. But Hu Yaobang’s resignation had come at the beginning of that year, and his successor, Zhao Ziyang, had to waver his way across a political tightrope. He did not dare shortchange the Four Basic Principles and risk drawing fire from his political opponents. So the term peaked just as political reform was in its inception as an issue.
The term came up just once in President Jiang Zemin’s report to the 15th National Congress in 1997, as a nod of acknowledgement, but without particular emphasis. One question remains: why, in President Hu Jintao’s report to the 17th National Congress in 2007, did usage of the Four Basic Principles surpass both of the previous political reports, those in 1997 and 2002?
In fact, the Chinese Communist Party long ago scrapped the first two of the Four Basic Principles. China would “adhere to the socialist path,” said Deng Xiaoping. But in no respect is “socialism” in China today similar to socialism as Party leaders would have understood it when Deng uttered these principles in 1979. Before the opening and reform policy was initiated, China’s economic system was a system of Soviet-style planning combined with Mao Zedong-style command economics. By the standards of the day, today’s China would no doubt be regarded as having taken the capitalist road.
In the second of his Four Basic Principles, Deng Xiaoping said China would “adhere to the dictatorship of the proletariat.” But this idea has, not unlike the original notion of socialism, become something of an anachronism with the Party. It has virtually disappeared from use, except in rare instances where it is raised as a matter of historical fact. The last use of the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a matter of current relevance in the official People’s Daily newspaper, in fact, was the August 2004 article by Chen Kuiyuan, the same one I alluded to above.
The current term of favor, replacing “dictatorship of the proletariat,” is “people’s democratic dictatorship,” or renmin minzhu zhuanzheng. And even this term is something of a rarity these days. Here I have graphed the frequency of the use of the term “dictatorship” in successive political reports.

As readers can readily see, use of the term “dictatorship” fell dramatically after the 11th National Congress, held in August 1977, and has declined ever since.
Of the remaining two of Deng Xiaoping’s Four Basic Principles, the “leadership of the Chinese Communist Party” remains unshaken and unchanged. The last, “Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought,” is a matter for further study and scrutiny. In particular, “Mao Zedong Thought,” this deep-red expression, is like a terminological zombie, dead in one sense but in another refusing to die, vested with so much political baggage that it still haunts China’s politics. Clearly, for many Party chieftains this term continues to have utility.
The term Mao Zedong Thought originated with the Party’s 7th National Congress in 1945. In 1956, as the Communist International criticized the cult of personality in which the former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had enveloped himself, it seemed untimely to harp on the political philosophy of China’s own personal dictator; Mao Zedong Thought was dropped at the 8th National Congress in September 1956. But after the Lushan Conference in 1959, the term resurfaced in the People’s Daily. This marked a direct and concerted campaign to preserve Mao’s moral and political authority following the calamities of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Chinese Famine.
Under the direction of Marshal Lin Biao, the People’s Liberation Army took the vanguard in “holding high the great red banner of Mao Zedong Thought.” Before the onset of the Cultural Revolution, the term was already running hot in the Party newspapers. During the Cultural Revolution, the term blazed hotter than the sun in the sky, and more than a few lives were scorched by this ideological weapon, jailed and even killed for “opposing Mao Zedong Thought.”
After the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party cautiously questioned and redressed the errors of Mao Zedong. Many of the most integral aspects of Mao Zedong Thought — the people’s communes, class struggle, continuing revolution — were scrapped. But the hardened shell of Mao Zedong Thought stubbornly remained, venerated by some. Here is how the term has fared from the 11th National Congress in 1977 to the 17th National Congress in 2007:

During the 11th and 12th National Congresses in 1977 and 1982 respectively, Mao Zedong Thought continued to make a strong showing. But as the political reform agenda was kick-started at the 13th National Congress in 1987, the term sank to an historic low. For Maoists within the Party, the chaos that followed the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing on June 4, 1989, was an opportunity to restore their leftist agenda; the term Mao Zedong Thought made a comeback in the 1990s, rising steadily through to the 15th National Congress in 1997. In 2002, as he handed the presidency over to Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin tried to shift China’s politics to the right, and Mao Zedong Thought was played down somewhat in that year’s political report. Five years later, in Hu Jintao’s report to the 17th National Congress, the term trended upward yet again.
The uptick of Mao Zedong Thought in the 2007 political report might have been dismissed as incidental. But there were other signs too. In 2009, a mass military procession, full of pomp and pageantry, was planned to commemorate the Party’s 60th anniversary. Initially, there were to be three major parade groups eulogizing the Party leaders of the reform era — Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Three days before the celebrations, however, a fourth “Mao Zedong Thought parade column” was added to the mix. For those awaiting a renewed political reform agenda, the sudden appearance of this parade column was like a thunder roll, signaling stormy days ahead.

President Hu Jintao seems to have been even more tolerant of China’s Maoist left than his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, and has made no apparent attempts to stay the leftists’ advance. The following is a graph of occurrences of “Mao Zedong Thought” in the People’s Daily during Hu Jintao’s term in office:

The 2011 peak holds not just for the Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, but also for its robust online portal, People’s Daily Online, where occurrences of Mao Zedong Thought in 2011 were higher than in the previous three years. This is a reflection of the din of so-called red propaganda, which was driven to a national climax in 2011 by the “red song” campaign of prominent Party “princeling” Bo Xilai, then a top Party leader in the city of Chongqing.
Since the dramatic fall of Bo Xilai in 2012, the term Mao Zedong Thought has cooled somewhat in China’s official Party media. In the first half of 2012, the term appeared 67 times in the People’s Daily (against 227 times for all of 2011). But there are no signs that the term is going away.
On July 12, 2012, China’s Central Party School held a commencement ceremony at which Xi Jinping, Hu Jintao’s presumed successor, delivered the address. According to the official news report from the People’s Daily, the graduates had, thanks to their activities at the school, “deepened their study and understanding of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and particularly the theory of socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Not long after, on July 23, President Hu Jintao addressed a seminar of provincial-level Party cadres and spoke of the “guidance” of Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought.
Usage of the term Four Basic Principles by senior Party officials today is roughly the same as the term Mao Zedong Thought. Both are used sparingly, but are still in use. A search of the People’s Daily from the 17th National Congress in 2007 up to August 2012 shows that Hu Jintao, Wu Bangguo, He Guoqiang and Xi Jinping have all used the term Four Basic Principles. Premier Wen Jiabao has made many public speeches during this time, but not once since 2008 has he used Four Basic Principles or Mao Zedong Thought.
The Four Basic Principles (including Mao Zedong Thought) is an important measuring stick by which we can observe the political trends of the 18th National Congress. Before the 17th National Congress in 2007, many Chinese had hoped for the possibility of political reform. I wrote in an essay for Hong Kong’s Yazhou Zhoukan at the time: “Hu Jintao and his succession team have already come to the great door of political reform. The question of whether they can step over the threshold of history will be answered when we know whether their feet are still shackled by the Four Basic Principles.”
As it turned out, the Four Basic Principles and Mao Zedong Thought were both present in Hu Jintao’s political report, and in fact were used more frequently than in the political report five years earlier. On this basis, I concluded that “we cannot harbor romantic thoughts about the possibility of political reform in the next five years.” My conclusion has been borne out by political realities over the past few years. Now, once again, we can apply this measuring stick to see what possibilities the next five years might hold.

The following post by China Media Project director Qian Gang (钱钢) about The China Model, a text introduced in Hong Kong recently as part of a proposed “national education” curriculum, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 10 p.m. yesterday, September 9, 2012. Qian Gang currently has more than 1.2 million followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].

The blasting fuse that touched off a mighty ruckus over education in Hong Kong was this teaching text. The preparation was entrusted to the National Education Center, which is subsidized by the SAR government (reports have said it received one million in funding), and the center then outsourced its production to Hong Kong Baptist University, which in turn outsourced it again — please note, this time it was outsourced to Beijing Normal University. This is really surprising! This sort of controversial content wouldn’t even make it into teaching materials in mainland primary and secondary schools. The “China Model” camp is allied with old leftists in Hong Kong, and they are a danger to Hong Kong that people should really be alert to.

The post, which received more than 4,000 re-posts and 1,140 comments before being deleted, is accompanied by an image of the cover of The China Model.

Qian Gang’s original Chinese-language post follows:

在香港引起国民教育轩然大波的导火线，是这本教材。特区政府资助的国民教育服务中心承接编写（报道说花费百万），外判给浸会大学，然后再次外判——请注意，这次是外判了北师大。实在令人吃惊，这种争议性内容，在内地中小学都不会成为教材。“中国模式”派和香港老左联手，他们对香港的祸害值得警惕。

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

In a post yesterday to our Anti-Social List, we shared a deleted Weibo from Chow Po Chung (周保松), a professor in the Department of Government and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Chow’s deleted post included an essay in text-as-image form that is purported to have been written by a mainland student reflecting back on 16 years of “patriotic education.”
In his deleted post, Professor Chow encouraged Weibo users to read the essay quickly, before it was removed by internet censors. However, while many posts including the essay have indeed been removed — particularly from scholars and journalists with a strong following on Weibo — it is still being shared on Chinese social media. It was still available here, and here, for example, at the time of this post.

[ABOVE: Protestors in Hong Kong voice opposition to a proposed “national education” curriculum many call “brainwashing”. The protest banner reads: “My mommy teaches me kindheartedness and justice. The Chinese Communist Party teaches me to bury my conscience.” Photo by Ansel Ma, available at Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.]
A partial translation of the essay, and interesting addition to the ongoing debate over a proposed “national education” curriculum in Hong Kong, follows:

Why do I oppose national education? This question is perhaps not a real question, but it nevertheless prompted me to consider it at some length. As an ordinary person without power or money, my parents had no opportunity to send me to an international school or pack me off overseas. Therefore, from primary school all the way to university, like the vast majority of ordinary Chinese students, I spent 16 years in a public school.
National education was a shadow that followed me throughout those 16 years. Nevertheless, it had no affect on me or on my fellows. Among my classmates, not a single person cares about the Chinese Communist Party, not a single person believes that the Chinese Communist Party is supremely great or correct. It seems our 16 years of national education were an utter failure. Well then, is there any real need to oppose national education? The following is my attempt to offer my thoughts on this question from the standpoint of someone who spent 16 years alongside a “great, glorious and correct Party,” educated with the idea of loving the Party and loving the country.
When I was in primary school, we had a class called “Ideas and Morals” (思想道德), about what it meant to be a person with idea and morals, which naturally meant loving the Party, loving the country and loving the people. The language they used was very ambiguous, not like the education materials for national education in Hong Kong right now, but aside from this on every important Party occasion there would be various writing contests, or speech contests, and you were forced to take part. You also you had to extoll and praise the the assessments made by other students of the great achievements of the Party.
In a benighted state we were subjected to “national education” in those days, hearing about the great strategic move that was the Long March (only after studying history at university did I realize that actually this was retreat made after being encircled and suppressed by the Kuomintang); about the glorious exploits of our Party in the anti-Japanese war (again, it was only at university that I learned that it was only the Kuomintang, who had been branded traitors, that had directly engaged the Japanese, and the Party was only back in the rear experimenting with land reform).
Even bombarded again and again with these things, distinguished and obedient young students and cadres though we were, it was only about learning things that had to be on your tongue, and nothing ever entered into our hearts. Why? Because these things were so remote from our lives compared to the other work we had, and in our actual lives we never felt any sense of the new China and the new lives that was being drummed into us [in these classes]. As for our parents, they paid a lot of attention to our Chinese language and mathematics work, but they were noncommittal or even cold about this ostensibly important coursework in patriotic education.
In middle school these classes on ideas and morals became classes on ideas and politics, but the content differed only slightly.
We now had a class director who would often hold on to us for a while after class was dismissed and carry out various forms of ideological education. But for rebellious middle school students these things only elicited greater annoyance, whether over stuff we had to memorize or the babbling nonsense of “Old Woman Marxism-Leninism” (马列老太). Because we, who were just beginning to understand the adult world, were very clear that the class director detained us and forced us to listen to this patriotic education stuff not because she really believed the things she insisted were so important, but because if we did well her credits as a class director would result in a better assessment from the principal, and if the principal had more excellent class directors he could earn political credits with the local educational authorities, and naturally he could then advance as an official and make more money, and then someone in the local education office could then . . . [the pause implies that everyone on up the chain of command benefits] . . . So all the things we were being inculcated with were really about nothing more than our teachers enabling themselves to earn points.
When it came to university, we no longer just had education in ideology and politics — we now had education in situations and policy, serial blasts of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory. But within the university the teachers we most looked down on were the ones who taught these courses. We skipped class, or giggled and chattered all the way through. We ate snack food and watched movies [on our mobiles], or just napped. And when it came to discussion time, when certain students earnestly answer [the teacher’s] questions, we heckled them. But there was nothing these teachers could do, because long before they had lost their dignity as teachers they had lost the students’ respect. We knew only too well that only those with no academic ability would be called upon to teach such things, and their only way was to kiss ass and massage their connections so they could earn such a place in the university.
Having said all this, do I think national education it successful? It could be called a failure, because it even after 16 years . . . not a single person will believe any of it. But it could also be said to be a great success as rarely seen on this earth, because even though everyone knows it’s all a bunch of lies from head to tail, it has managed to persist all these years, repeated from generation to generation.
Is national education something to fear? Actually, all that language written out so clear isn’t really scary, fundamentally speaking. The more extreme they get in propagating it, the funnier it seems. But it is also frightening in another way, because the whole nation is willing to lap up all of these lies. How many students, knowing their fates could be decided on this basis, have answered the topics earnestly, numbly writing all of those pretty words they don’t mean, knowing full well it is all a lie? And how many teachers, knowing these are all lies, have had to teach this as the truth, and even us it to assess students ideologically and morally?
This is the most frightful thing about national education!
Its most frightful aspect isn’t about the words themselves, or about the praising of the Communist Party, rather it’s that it has drummed lying into the very nature of our students, our teachers and our entire educational sphere!

The following post by Chow Po Chung (周保松), a professor in the Department of Government and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 10:40 a.m. today, September 5, 2012. Chow currently has more than 32,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].

Because of what has recently been going on in Hong Kong, a mainland friend took to Facebook to write her thoughts about receiving 16 years of ideological and political education. Every word brings tears to the eye. I don’t know how long this [post] will survive, so if you want to read it be quick about it..”

The post shares a text-as-image file of the essay on national education purportedly written by a mainland student. We’ve translated the opening, which is below the file:

Here is a translation of the first paragraph of the essay:

Why do I oppose national education? This question is perhaps not a real question, but it nevertheless prompted me to consider it at some length. As an ordinary person without power or money, my parents had no opportunity to send me to an international school or pack me off overseas. Therefore, from primary school all the way to university, like the vast majority of ordinary Chinese students, I spent 16 years in a public school. National education was a shadow that followed me throughout those 16 years. Nevertheless, it had no affect on me or on my fellows. Among my classmates, not a single person cares about the Chinese Communist Party, not a single person believes that the Chinese Communist Party is supremely great or correct. It seems our 16 years of national education were an utter failure. Well then, is there any real need to oppose national education? The following is my attempt to offer my thoughts on this question from the standpoint of someone who spent 16 years alongside a “great, glorious and correct Party,” educated with the idea of loving the Party and loving the country.

Chow’s original Chinese-language post follows:

因為香港最近發生的事，一位內地朋友在Facebook寫下她對身受的十六年思想政治教育的反思，讀來一字一淚。不知道它能存活太久，所以想讀的要快。

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

The following post by Weibo user “Hong Kong Online” (香港在線) about continued resistance in Hong Kong to a proposed “national education” curriculum supported by Beijing was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 12:05 p.m. today, September 4, 2012. Hong Kong Online currently has more than 63,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].

You want to win the heart of the Hong Kong people, fine. Make use of the line by [Taiwan’s] Lung Ying-tai: “Please use civilization to convince me.”

The post was a comment by Hong Kong Online to a post it made just moments earlier, which remains undeleted. This suggests that the present of Lung Ying-tai’s name in the second post resulted in its deletion:

Some people say that Hong Kong should have national education because while the territory returned [to China] in 1997, the Hong Kong people have not yet returned in their hearts. There might be some sense in this statement, but Hong Kong is a special case and it requires understanding and tolerance. Over hundreds of years, Hong Kong has gone from a small fishing village to an international city, in the process developing its own social system and set of values. It’s perhaps impossible for it to join the rail with the mainland just like that. If you want to change Hong Kong you must improve yourself first.

The following are the original Chinese posts, first the later deleted post followed by the undeleted earlier post:

要得港人心，可以。借龙应台的一句话就是，“请用文明来说服我”。
——
有人说，香港之所以开展国民教育，是因为97年香港只是主权回归，港人的心尚未回归。也许这一说法有一定道理，但是香港毕竟有其特殊性，需更多的理解和包容。数百年来，香港由一个小渔村变成国际大都市，形成了自己的社会制度和价值观，一下子和内地接轨几乎是不可能的。想改变香港，首先必须完善自己。

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

The following article is a translation from the Chinese, originally posted at Deutsche Welle on August 6, 2012, and re-posted by Chang Ping to his personal weblog on September 3.
Opposition is still growing in Hong Kong to a proposed curriculum of national education, or guomin jiaoyu (国民教育), that many locals believe is being pushed by Beijing. A hunger strike action planned for today (August 6) was postponed. But supposing the government does not give up these plans, more protests can be expected with the beginning of the school term in September.
News media inside China have continued to push the case for national education in Hong Kong. There was the Chinese-language Global Times running an editorial on August 2 arguing that national education would encourage young people in Hong Kong to expand their horizons, suggesting in a lofty, pedagogical tone: “The ultimate end to the controversy over national education in Hong Kong can only be ‘victory for China’. In pursuing only their own individual victories, these objectors are perhaps being unrealistic.” And an article in today’s (August 6) overseas edition of the People’s Daily said that promoting national education would help young people in Hong Kong better understand their country, and “only when young people understand and identify with their country can they accurately understand its policies, know their place, and seize opportunities. It is not wrong to work now for the future of young people.”
Is the Global Times correct in suggesting that there is only one possible outcome to this struggle? And is it right to suggest that China will be “victorious” if it forces through a national education curriculum?
The idea behind national education is that, beginning in the current academic year, authorities in Hong Kong supplement the original moral education curriculum with national education content. Judging from teaching materials that have already become public, this curriculum follows the lines somewhat of the so-called patriotic education carried out inside China by the Communist Party for years, using the framework of nationalism to address history and culture. And the curriculum resorts to outright lies in drawing a halo over the head of the so-called “China Model.”
Many in support [of the curriculum], whether the official in the mainland liaison office who once suggested that “brainwashing is necessary,” or the articles in the Global Times and the People’s Daily, have said that national education is carried out in Western countries, only in a different way. This need to point West is unusual, because as soon as anyone brings up democracy and freedom these very same officials and state media say that [China] will “resolutely not follow Western [political] models.” But of course so-called “national education” in the West is inseparable from their political systems, speech environments and concepts of human rights.
This inconsistency of logic appears again and again in China’s public opinion environment, and there is a great big market for it. For example, if you advocate the idea of learning from Western countries, suggesting that more benefits should be given to people in lower social strata, they will fire right back with the argument that China’s population is too big, that if everyone is given more benefits this will work out to be a huge number and there is no way society can support it — therefore there’s no way things can be done as they are in the West.
If you change the subject to government corruption, no one will think to apply the same logic, that there are too many officials in China and if every official takes a bit on the side this will work out to a huge sum and there is no way society can bear it, therefore Chinese officials must be cleaner than those in the West. In fact, the Global Times will argue, as it did earlier this year, that the people of China should tolerate “moderate corruption” among officials.
Moreover, these officials and media speak in generalities about “national education in Western countries,” but they have never explained specifically what they are talking about. The People’s Daily said that it was “only different in form.” If we’re talking about the fact that these [forms of national education] are not a forced inculcation, or that they are not premised on lies, then I suppose the differences are quite substantial indeed.
The majority of developed countries in the West did have different forms of “national education”, and some might even have been construed as “partisan education” about loving one’s country, one’s party or one’s leaders. But since the end of the Second World War, ideas, culture and education in Western developed nations have basically made their way out of the morass of pre-modern concepts of nationalism through a process of self-examination and deconstruction.
One might argue that this reassessment is a kind of reconstitution and consolidation of national visions of cultures and political systems, but freedom of thought, open media, cultural diversity and democracy are preconditions, and [this reconstitution] is a process of constantly challenging illegitimate systems, overturning governments that displease, and transforming culture.
The editorial in the People’s Daily said that “without a clear identification with their country and a sense of cultural belonging, young people have no way of truly participating in discussion and decision-making in society, and a modern nation cannot develop in a healthy manner — this has long been something of which the public is aware.”
In fact, it’s this pre-modern notion of nationalism that has long been a subject of public questioning, even if we admit that a sense of national identity and cultural belonging are important, and if people are given the opportunity to seek out this sense of identity and belonging, then they will inevitably stand up, opposing media that monopolize ideas, education that strangles culture, and governments and corrupt officials that strip citizens of their rights. This, in fact, is precisely what young people in Hong Kong who take part in the June Fourth commemoration in Victoria Park, who voice their support for Liu Xiaobo’s “Charter Eight” and who oppose national education in Hong Kong are up to.
This is a necessary contradiction that authoritarian regimes face when they call on the people to love their country. When the Chinese Communist Party, then regarded as an opposition party, called on the people to resist the corrupt government of the Kuomintang [in the beginning of the last century], they labeled themselves as patriots.
This round of protests in Hong Kong is of utmost importance. Inside mainland China, the Chinese Communist Party has conducted its program of “national education” for more than 60 years, and the results are apparent to all. Those who have received this education find it difficult to expand their horizons — they are closed-minded and intolerant. In this era of exploding information, what many young Chinese glimpse through the smoke are still elemental notions like “patriotism”, “treachery,” “China’s rise” and “Western conspiracies.” The privileged, rich and powerful who have an opportunity to expand their horizons are steadily streaming overseas — and what does that say about their sense of identification and belonging?
If a curriculum of this type is rolled out in Hong Kong, this will be the territory’s fate as well. The vast majority of people will have the wool pulled over their eyes while the elite muddle along, and in the end China will have deprived itself of a valuable window that can ventilate the country with ideas.
Fortunately, this movement has already begun, and it won’t possibly end, as the Global Times suggests, with “victory for China.” This process of resistance is the real “national education.” And the young people who receive this education will only identify more deeply with freedom of thought and cultural diversity under a system of democratic politics.

In August 2012, Garth Peterson, the former managing director of Morgan Stanley’s real estate investment business in Shanghai, pleaded guilty in the U.S. to one count of violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. From 2004 to 2007, Peterson obtained millions of dollars worth of real estate investments for the former chairman of a Chinese state-owned enterprise, and for himself, in exchange for business deals for Morgan Stanley. In an interview with CNBC, Peterson talked about the culture of investment banking in China:

No one paid any attention. Zero. And thousands of dollars would get spent on a night, a few people, nobody thought about it. And compliance never worried about that, you know. So, that put– that can easily put somebody in a difficult position, where it’s okay to be taking from deemed officials, but never being able to give something back to them.
And again, this is where it’s a difficult thing, especially in a place like China, where you get the guanxi thing, where you do something for me, I do something back for you, you do something– me. And– yeah, it would be interesting to see how, if at all, the FCPA can be– can take, you know, those kind of factors into consideration.
. . . You see, it’s actually– the details are very complex. You’d have to ask yourself, at this point, why he’s still fine and has no problems. And the reason is that, actually, he didn’t invest as well. He just fronted for me and two other people. So, the Chinese government did its own investigation, and determined I never bribed him. Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have, you know, secretly invested. But– I never bribed him, and that’s what the Chinese government determined. And that’s– the truth, I never bribed anybody.

In the following cartoon, posted to Sina Weibo by Guangdong’s Window on the South magazine, a golden-haired foreign hands a surprised Chinese client a bag labeled “bribe.” The foreigner says: “This is just a small token. A guest must do as the host does.”

The following post by Li Chao (李超), director of the Hainan People’s Congress Office of Training (海南人大干训办主任), about a spotting of a Chinese official tour bus at Japan’s Mount Fuji, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 3:42 a.m. today, August 29, 2012. Li Chao currently has just under 162,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].

[Yesterday, touring at the foot of Mount Fuji, I happened across a special tour bus for a delegation for the Henan Provincial Governor Zhang]. When going out on tours, this provincial governor, surnamed Zhang, doesn’t really need to hang signs like this in the window, does he? Are you afraid people won’t know you’re a provincial governor from China? OK! I’ll help you do a bit of propaganda! Everyone, help me pass this along on the behalf of the provincial governor!

The post was accompanied by an image of purported to be the tour bus at Japan’s Mount Fuji with a sign identifying it as that of the Henan Provincial Government. The sign is visible at the upper right-hand side of the image. Below is a close-up of the sign, which reads: “Delegation of Henan Provincial Government’s Governor Zhang.”

In fact, the sign most likely refers to Henan’s deputy governor, Zhang Guangzhi (张广智), who was appointed to the post in January 2012. However, Zhang was in Henan just days ago to address a forum of international scholars, according to the official Henan Daily.
Interestingly, the post, which is attributed originally to Yuan Dongming (袁东明), a Weibo user from Liaoning province with just 169 followers, is still available elsewhere on Sina Weibo, and has been tagged as a “HOT”, or popular, post.
As this apparent visit to Japan by a “provincial governor” (deputy governor?) comes amid rising tensions between China and Japan, some Chinese chided the Henan officials for their “courage.” One user remarked, tongue-in-cheek: “These leaders can really deal with adversity. For them to enter the tiger’s den when tensions between both sides are so high — ah, their courage makes China sigh with emotion!”

The following is the original Chinese post:

【昨日在富士山脚下游玩，无意中发现了河南省政府张省长旅游专车】这位张姓省长大人出来旅游也不要弄个这样的牌子挂在车窗上吧？生怕大家不知道您是中国省长？好！俺也帮您宣传推广一下！大家帮帮忙，为省长转转！

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.