Tiibet students of an experimental secondary school in Lhasa in Tibetan (18 September 2015)
Schools in the vast majority of China enforce government orders to clean up books that are "illegal" and ""inappropriate "books to ensure ideological purity in the education system. A comment was made that this was similar to the Cultural Revolution burning book of the year.
At least 30 of China's 33 provinces and cities have cleaned up school books and hundreds of thousands of "illegal" and "inappropriate" books have been removed and many burned, a Reuters report said.
On October 15,2019, the Ministry of Education of China issued the notice on carrying out the special action of book review and clean-up in primary and secondary school libraries nationwide. The circular requires all localities to review and clean up books in primary and secondary school libraries, with emphasis on illegal books and unsuitable books.
Illegal books
The circular stated that the standards of illegal books include opposing the principle of collection as stipulated in the constitution; endangering national unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity; divulging state secrets, endangering national security or harming national honour and interests; inciting national hatred and discrimination; disturbing social order and undermining social stability; and illegal books also include insulting and demonizing party and state leader and British figures in violation of the Party's line, principles and policies, and making jokes about party history, national history and military history; and books violating religious policies.
The criteria for inappropriate books include non-compliance with the official socialist core values; deviations in world outlook, outlook on life and values; advocacy of narrow nationalism and racism; advocacy of religious doctrines, teachings and rules;
The clean-up also includes "books with poor appearance and no preservation value ".
School Trouble
Reuters said the clean-up was completed and replaced by new books such as the Communist Party Declaration, Mao Zedong Poems and Uncle Tom's house 》, as requested by the Ministry of Education. The new book recommended by the Ministry of Education has 422 pages.
A middle school teacher in rural areas told Reuters that the school's clean-up began in late April, and the librarian led a small group of staff to check books after school. They worked five to six hours a night for seven days in a row, thumbed through thousands of books, found out about a hundred books that met the requirements of the Ministry of Education, and then filled out forms to report them. Cleansing included traditional comic books, Christian and Buddhism books and Western books such as 1984, teachers said. The teacher said ," of course, the students don't read these books anyway "," so if we' re going to take some books off, start with these ."
A teacher in Gansu province told Reuters that many rural libraries are small, some shaky and have little content-sensitive books. His rural school cleaned up about 80 books, but only removed them from the shelves and stored them.
Brain battles
Some analysts say that China's content censor work has been carried out strictly under the leadership of Xi Jinping, but this is China's first national clean-up campaign against school libraries in decades.
"Competition for the minds of young people is one of the most important things for the Chinese Communist Party ," Wu said, as Hong Kong's young protest activities have taught the Chinese Communist Party the importance of education. "Hong Kong's lack of patriotic education is the cause of such brutal protest ," Sun Peidong, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, told Reuters.
(This article is based on a Reuters report. )
