Day: September 7, 2021

Political inspectors sent into universities by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have said most higher education institutions aren’t doing enough to promote the party’s ideology on campus.

An inspection team sent by the CCP Central Committee found a lack of interest on the part of young people and a bureaucratic mentality in higher education were largely to blame for the failure to promote the personal ideology of CCP general secretary Xi Jinping, whose governing style is regularly compared by commentators to the personality cult around late supreme leader Mao Zedong.

The inspectors visited 31 colleges and universities across China, and found little evidence that they were implementing Beijing’s orders, according to a notice on the website of the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).

“Ideological and political education is relatively weak,” the notice said, after inspectors visited some of the best-known universities in the country, including Peking and Tsinghua Universities in Beijing, Nanjing University, Fudan University and Jiaotong University in Shanghai.

“There are shortcomings when it comes to building school spirit and [ideological] study ethic,” the notice said, adding, “There are prominent issues [linked to a] bureaucratic mentality. There is insufficient implementation of the party line in the new era.”

Chinese dissident Gong Yujian said the team was like an imperial-era inspection team working on behalf of an emperor.

“To put it bluntly, they are sending out a patrol to put the frighteners on officials further down the hierarchy, to give them a kick, and a warning,” Gong said. “If this doesn’t get rectified, Xi Jinping will be very unhappy.”

“The next step could be a Central Committee investigation team and taskforce,” he said. “They will make use of the CCP disciplinary system as well as the legal system.”

“This inspection team was sent by Xi Jinping as a warning to lower-ranking officials.”

Gong said the insistence on the study of Xi’s ideology was similar to the Mao era.

“We’re just going back to the Mao era now,” he said. “Xi wants to rule the CCP and the whole of China, bring them under one leader, one ideology.”

Largely uninterested

Chen Chien-fu, vice president of the Taiwan Professors Association, said it is telling that young Chinese people seem largely uninterested in Xi Jinping Thought.

“They have had contact with the West, and have come to see CCP ideological education and idols as having little to do with their own concerns,” Chen told RFA. “Xi Jinping clearly thinks there are big obstacles in Chinese society to his cult of personality.”

“So he sent in the central government inspection teams.”

Several lecturers at the universities on the list either declined to comment on Tuesday when contacted by RFA, or hung up the phone.

A lecturer who works in higher education in the southern province of Guangdong, who asked to remain anonymous, said there is a current ban on any teachers or lecturers giving interviews without prior authorization.

While universities have always had compulsory political studies for first-year undergraduates under CCP rule, the departments which ran them are gradually being repurposed as “departments of Marxism,” the lecturer said.

He said part of the current government crackdown on China’s entertainment industry is linked to a perception in Beijing that young people are too taken with celebrity culture and fandom, as well as video games.

For example, Chinese postgraduates carry out around 80 percent of global research into video game culture, with Japan trailing at around 20 percent, the lecturer said.

That is now likely to change.

“I heard that there is a ban on writing about electronic gaming in academic papers from this year,” he said.

Party tightening its grip

The CCP is in the process of tightening its ideological grip on higher education in the country, ordering structural changes that will allow a far greater degree of party control in the day-to-day running of colleges and universities.

Institutions are now required to ensure that their in-house party committee “exercises comprehensive leadership” over their teaching, scientific research, and administration, according to a revised set of rules issued on April 22.

Party branches should also be set up to guide the work of teachers, researchers on specific projects, undergraduate students, and other sub-groups within a university, it said, choosing members with “a strong party spirit.”

Their job is to carry out propaganda work and implement the central party line, as decided by Beijing,

Xi’s approach stems from a 2013 article titled “Improving Ideological and Political Work Among Young Teachers in Colleges and Universities,” and from his reiteration of the “Seven Taboos” that mustn’t be discussed in public by servants of the state, including teachers.

The seven banned topics are: universal values of human rights and democratic, constitutional government; press freedom; civil society; citizens’ rights; the historical mistakes of the Chinese Communist Party; the financial and political elite; and judicial independence.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Authorities have detained about 40 undocumented Myanmar migrant workers in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong after they complained to their embassy about forced unpaid labor at a seafood plant, while 60 others are still working there without pay, one of the affected workers told RFA.

The 100 laborers are among a pool of some 230,000 workers who’ve sought work in China in the wake of armed conflict, environmental destruction and natural disasters in Myanmar, the Mekong region’s largest source of migrants, according to the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Myanmar migrants working in factories, construction sites, farms, restaurants, and as domestic helpers in China are not legally allowed to work in their giant neighbor, leaving them vulnerable to abuses including forced labor, wage theft, human trafficking, extortion, and debt bondage, aid groups say.

One of 100 Myanmar workers who had been working without pay since April at the Nishi Haitai Marine Food Co., Ltd. plant in the Shandong port city of Weihai contacted the Myanmar Embassy about the abusive practices.

Police first raided the plant in early June and arrested some Myanmar workers, but they were not sent to the Myanmar border for deportation and remain as forced laborers in the same factory, said the worker, who used the pseudonym Phoe Taung in his communication with the embassy and with RFA.

Around 60 Chinese police raided the plant in a second raid in August, and arrested 40 of the 100 workers, including Phoe Taung’s brother, Aung Myat Min, he said.

“The company must have bribed the police to raid and arrest Myanmar workers,” he told RFA’s Myanmar Service.

“They arrested them instead of paying the wages for three months they were owed. The workers later realized the police were not bogus and that they were working together with the owner.”

Awaiting deportation

Police confiscated the Myanmar workers’ cellphones, money, and other possessions, and have not yet announced when they would deport them back to Myanmar, said Phoe Taung.

Police officers came to the seafood processing plant, but the Chinese owners “had some police in their pockets,” Phoe Taung said.

The officers detained Aung Myat Min in handcuffs in a kitchen away from other workers and left him there for four days, he added.

Phoe Taung is now in hiding from the plant owner and Chinese police, who have been looking for him since he reported the abuse of Myanmar workers to the embassy and the media.

Myanmar’s embassy in Beijing told the workers that Chinese police would help them return home, but so far none of relatives of the detained workers have been contacted by the embassy, and their families have not been able to contact them while they are being held by Chinese authorities, Phoe Taung said.

Phoe Taung and his brother, from Taze township in northwestern Myanmar’s Sagaing region, worked in the Shandong plant for a monthly salary of 5,000 yuan (U.S. $773) before the coronavirus pandemic, Phoe Taung said.

The father of the two migrant workers said that during the pandemic his son hired a middleman to travel to Shandong for the factory job through an illegal border crossing at Muse in northern Shan state.

“He worked for the same company before, so he trusted them, assuming that the situation would be the same,” Win Myint said. “They gave meals to the workers, but they hadn’t received their wages for a long time.”

No Sino-Myanmar labor agreement

The Myanmar embassy in Beijing told him that officials there would take care of the arrested workers, but “they just ran away from the responsibility,” he said.

Win Myint said as he has been contacting Myanmar embassy, but everyone who answers the phone immediately hangs up on him.

RFA contacted the Myanmar embassy in Beijing on Aug. 30, but a staffer told a reporter to call back later, and subsequent calls were not answered.  RFA also contacted the Chinese embassy in Yangon by email, but has not received a response.

Myanmar authorities have been issuing red permit booklets with one-year expiration date for residents of northern Shan state to cross the border into China for travel.

Migrant workers from other states and regions can get a green permits for a single-trips to the Chinese border town of Ruili, across from Muse.  

Volunteers who provide assistance to Myanmar migrant workers said many laborers use the border-crossing permit booklets and cards illegally to work in China.

Ko Htay, chairman of Muse Humanitarian Aid Network, said his organization receives requests from detained migrant workers every day.  

“Some people from Kunming contacted us yesterday [because] they are too afraid to contact Myanmar consular office there as they don’t want to be charged,” he said.

The lack of a bilateral agreement regarding migrant workers is the cause of the problems, Ko Htay said.

“Myanmar has a bilateral agreement with Thailand, so migrant workers in Thailand got some form of protection,” he said.

“In Thai-Myanmar border towns like Maesot, migrant workers assistance groups are operating their activities legally. It is not the same in China.”

Reported by RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Two artists who have a huge following in China have announced they will give up their existing nationalities in order to be Chinese citizens, amid a widening purge on celebrity culture by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Action film actor Nicholas Tse, who was born in Hong Kong, told state broadcaster CCTV on Sunday saying he is in the process of renouncing his Canadian citizenship, amid rumors that a slew of household names in China are under pressure to do the same.

In a video clip from the CCTV6 show The Blue Feather Lounge, Tse, who has held dual citizenship since his parents moved to Vancouver in 1987, is seen saying that he feels he has a “sense of responsibility” to spread Chinese culture around the world.

“I was born in Hong Kong, so I am originally Chinese,” he said. “Actually, I have started the application process to renounce my Canadian citizenship.”

Rumors have been circulating on Chinese social media platforms since last week that the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has listed seven top celebrities, of whom Tse is one, who hold foreign citizenship but were born in Hong Kong or China.

According to unconfirmed reports, the list also includes Jet Li, Zhang Tielin, Crystal Liu, Will Pan, Wang Lee Hom and Mark Chao.

An official who answered the phone at SARFT on Monday told RFA to search for “the relevant laws and regulations” online, but no rules pertaining to celebrity nationalities were visible on its official website at that time.

Crackdown on celebrity culture

Meanwhile, singer, actress and broadcaster Maria Cordero, nicknamed Fat Mama, said she would likely renounce her Portuguese citizenship too.

“If you really want to get work in mainland China, then it’s the right thing to do,” Cordero told RFA. “If you work there, you should take Chinese citizenship. I have no problem with that.”

She said she was aware of the reports that Tse is renouncing his Canadian citizenship.

“I think they are all going to be doing this, one after another,” Cordero said. “Unless they decide that they don’t want to make that kind of money any more.”

Tse’s move comes amid a widening clampdown on celebrity culture under CCP general secretary Xi Jinping, with a slew of new regulations coming out of Beijing in recent weeks, targeting “unruly” fan behavior, “sissy” male stars, and warnings that celebrities who don’t display the correct attitude to China will no longer be welcome in its increasingly state-controlled markets.

The SARFT recently banned stars with “incorrect political positions,” unethical behavior and “effeminate” male styles from television shows and movies, after a string of scandals involving sexual assault, tax evasion and behavior deemed “unpatriotic” by the CCP.

Artists who are “alienated from the CCP and China,” were among the categories banned from appearing in films and TV shows, alongside those who “breach standards of social equity” or those who “violate public order and ethics.”

The administration also banned TV talent shows, which have been linked to the use of social media to get fans to spend money to boost the ratings of their favorite candidates.

The SARFT also hit out at “effeminate” male styles as well as shows built around scandals, ostentatious wealth and “vulgar” internet celebrities. It warned broadcasters that they should focus on building “positive energy” instead.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.