CCP Includes Xi’s Quotes in National College Entrance Exam Again to Tighten Political Control
This year’s China college entrance examination set up by the communist regime’s Ministry of Education includes Xi Jinping’s quotations as a composition topic.
This is the second time since five years ago that the regime leader’s words made it into one of the world’s most difficult college entrance exams, which is also known as Gaokao.
Experts pointed out that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is very afraid that it can’t control the thoughts of China’s youth, and its Cultural Revolution-style brainwashing methods are ineffective.
The national college entrance exams took place June 7–8.
Two idioms from Xi were included in the essay section. One is “Blowing out other people’s lamps will not make yours brighter; blocking others’ path will not make you go further.” Xi said it when he delivered a keynote speech on March 15 at a meeting between the CCP and what it called “world political parties” in Beijing.
The other idiom of Xi in the exam is “A single flower is not spring, but a hundred flowers blooming together will make the garden full of spring. If there is only one kind of flower in the world, no matter how beautiful it is, it’s still monotonous.” It’s from his speech at the opening ceremony of the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2013, which he also repeated in the dialogue with world political parties.
In the national exam, besides including the idioms from Xi, it also praised him for “expressing common truths in vivid language.”
Li Yuanhua, an Australia-based scholar and a former professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing, once participated in the design of national college entrance exams when he was in China. He told The Epoch Times on June 8 that the political sensitivity of using Xi’s quotes is beyond the authorization of scholars in the exam design group. There must be an order for it coming from high-level CCP authorities and then the group just implemented it.
“They dug up the method of controlling people’s thoughts in the Mao era and use it again now,” Li said.
Counterproductive in the Contemporary World
Tseng Chien-Yuan, chairman of the Taiwan Chinese Democratic College Association and Asian Public Cultural Association, told The Epoch Times on June 8 that the CCP regards loyalty to a specific political leader as content for a national examination.
“When you regard [Xi]’s remarks as the content of the national examination, and there are standard answers for it. [If] the students have other opinions, will they be suppressed? and will they be denied points in the grading?” Tseng said, adding “They may have the advanced ideas that will lead the next generation.”
In 2018, Xi’s quotes were used in the essay questions of China’s college entrance examination to highlight and promote “Xi Jinping Thought.”
At the end of last year, a “white paper movement” against the CCP’s COVID-19 lockdown broke out nationwide. Many participants were educated youth, including college students. Some protesters on the streets of major cities shouted the slogan “Down with the Communist Party! Down with Xi Jinping!”
Tseng said that this shows that the party-oriented education of the CCP can’t achieve its goal. For the mandatory learning materials, “students will throw it aside after the exam, and throw it away like trash.”
Wang He, U.S.-based China affairs commentator told The Epoch Times that most Chinese people are disgusted with Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution practices. “The actions of the [CCP] authorities have accelerated the change of the entire political situation in China. Therefore, in the slogans that people are shouting now, they have linked overthrowing Xi Jinping and overthrowing the CCP together.”
Ning Haizhong and Luo Ya contributed to this report.
