Editor’s Note:
This article, with the help of the association, was originally completed by members of the Historical Materialism group under the association as a mass submission for a conference in September 2024. The article, in light of current affairs, attempts to expose the true face of Zhang Guimei, who is promoted as a “true Communist,” and who serves as a faithful hound for the Chinese Nazi government. It also tries to analyze, from the standpoint of historical materialism, the phenomena in Chinese society of valuing men over women and the brutal oppression of women in education and other areas. However, due to limitations at the time and the level of ideological struggle not being high enough, many issues were not fully developed. The article not only contains some affected phrasing and formulation, but also uses historical materialism and dialectical materialism in a rather superficial way, often remaining at the level of generalization and description of phenomena, thus there are many defects and shortcomings.
Nevertheless, overall, this article takes a correct stance in criticizing the government’s unlimited promotion of reading, speculation, and “going up to the top of the priestly class” philosophy (i.e., climbing onto the throne of the exploitative class or becoming a good dog under the exploitative class) and attempts to point out that students should break with old families and old education. Therefore, this article is shared for your criticism and reference.
- On the contemporary Wu Xun and Zhang Guimei
[Image: Xi Jinping presenting the “National Model in Poverty Alleviation” to Zhang Guimei, 690x662]
- The Person of the Teacher and the Matter of Education
Regarding the question “What is education?” different classes have different answers. For the exploiters, in order to deceive the people and maintain their dictatorship, education is always distorted into an abstract virtue. They sometimes praise “Education means teaching and educating people,” and other times comment quite objectively that “any activity that increases people’s knowledge and skills and influences their ideological and ethical character is education.” In their mouths, education becomes a precious experience that meets the learning needs of all children and youth, and is the key link for inheriting and developing the productive experience of human society; teachers naturally become “soul engineers,” the “ones who mold and sustain human cultural science knowledge” until death.
To this day, despite news of teachers abusing students leading to injuries or deaths, and reports of students self-harming under heavy school pressure, many still believe that among the teaching staff there are some bad apples, but more often there are “noble people” who pursue dreams, care for students, and carry heavy burdens. Among them are top elites like Zhang Guimei, who do not pursue the prosperity of big cities, root themselves in rural mountains, and devote their lives to poor students; who do not love money, donating all income to poverty-stricken areas; self-sacrificing, having no children, and spending all family wealth to run schools… Represented by Zhang, these “soul engineers” are celebrated by the Chinese government, admired by parents and citizens, and have spread widely on the Internet, within easy reach:
- Chen Li-qun retired but continued… became principal at Taijiang National Middle School in Guizhou; the school’s appearance transformed within two months.
- Zhi Yueying has remained steadfast in remote mountain villages, educating two generations in the mountains… awarded the National May 1st Labor Medal.
- Zhang Yujun rooted in the deep mountains for 17 years, teaching more than 500 children… selflessly dedicating youth and blood and sweat to rural education.
But is education really as universally beautiful and noble as the ruling class proclaims? Are teachers as selfless and virtuous as the exploiters praise? The answer is no. In fact, all the flattery of education and teachers is merely the shameless lie fabricated by the exploiters to lull the masses and invert right and wrong. “The bourgeoisie has erased the sacred halo of professions traditionally respected and awe-inspiring.” Education in the superstructure must support a certain foundation; although different classes have sharply different views on education, they all understand its essence: to train successors for their own class. The exploiters do not reveal this directly but cloak it with titles like “the people’s war for universal education.” The broad teacher class paid by the bourgeoisie is far from a pure, abstract exemplary image; they are the workers who execute the will of the exploiters and sell themselves to the exploiters, “enjoying the false reputation conferred by a reformist government, drawing on the blood and sweat of the working masses, and becoming one of the most steadfast supporters of the capitalist system” (LSEP submission: On the reactionary essence of bourgeois teachers and social interrelations). The editor’s note: The vast majority of teacher incomes today come from local finances with some supplementation by the central government. The reformist ruling group knows well the important role of “soul engineers” in its reactionary superstructure, so whether on payroll or not, teacher wages are far higher than ordinary workers.
Today the reformist government’s praise of Zhang Guimei as a “public educator who does not seek fame or profit, self-sacrificing” recalls another “benevolent educator”: in late Qing era, someone who opened schools widely as part of the revolutionary wave among peasants, helping the Qing government stabilize rule, and was famed as the “Great Pious Beggar.” He tirelessly begged and accumulated funds to establish schools, not caring for himself; he was not fruitful in the ways of the family, yet rose to the seat of landowners after being appreciated by officials. Before the socialist revolution, some admired him as a “great popular educator,” and after capitalist restoration, he was again elevated as the pioneer of compulsory education in China — the infamous Wu Xun. Wu Xun was born to a peasant family but loyal to the landlord class’ rule, spending 30 or 40 years begging and teaching, acquiring over 300 mu of land across several counties, and rising to the landlord class’ throne. He established several “义学” (charity schools), widely rewarded by the ruling class: the governor of Shandong gave him the name “Xun” to imply “will pass on teachings,” the Guangxu Emperor honored him with the titles of “义学正” and “kindness,” awarded him a yellow gown, and his fame spread. It can be said that people like Wu Xun became a “leading sheep” raised by feudal class and wore a “义学正” badge to anesthetize or deceive the masses. Thus the ruling class hopes that “there will be hundreds or thousands of such slaves in the world.”
After Wu Xun’s death, every dynastic reactionary class shamelessly praised him with sentimental language: the Qing government erected monuments, the Beiyang government praised him, and the Jiang, Wang, and even the Japanese invaders lauded him. All anti-reactionary forces in and outside China unanimously portrayed Wu Xun as a hero who surrendered himself to the cause, in order to stifle revolutionary flame and promote social reform under reliance on a few “good people,” thereby maintaining the dictatorship of the dominion class.
Fifty years after the revisionist group seized party leadership, Wu Xun’s dead souls are again thriving across the land. As Mao Zedong pointed out, the evil of Wu Xun’s type lies in that they do not touch a single thread of feudal economic base or its superstructure, but instead zealously promote feudal culture and pursue a status to spread feudal culture, kowtowing to reactionary feudal rulers. Wu Xun’s personage is the same to Zhang Guimei as it was to the Qing government: both objectively served to uphold reactionary rule. Therefore, to revisit half a century ago’s criticisms of Wu Xun to expose Zhang Guimei’s deceit and to dissect today’s Nazi Chinese education system, is very necessary.
- Wu Xun’s Ghost Reborn in Zhang Guimei
As before, education is not simply teaching and educating; it is an activity by which a class trains its successor, ultimately a form of ideological hegemony. The bourgeoisie, possessing the production of spiritual goods, uses the state power to promote compulsory education, in schools instilling the slave philosophy and the worldview of the exploitative class among the laboring people’s children, attempting to train the younger generation to identify with the logic that “exploitation and oppression are reasonable, revolution and upheaval are unreasonable” and to become successors to capitalism. Yet to achieve this, it is not enough to rely solely on the educationalists of the exploiters. As Lenin pointed out: “It is better for the asset-takers to have someone from within the worker movement who is opportunist like them to defend the bourgeoisie than for the bourgeoisie to come out themselves.” To further consolidate their rule, they also need to continually recruit their agents from hostile classes. These people, born of the working class but leaning toward capitalism, can play a stronger role in deceiving and numbing the people than a ruler could. Therefore, the reactionaries’ repulsion lies partly in “comforting the oppressed and painting a future of reduced suffering under the condition of preserving ruling class control;” and partly in “not touching a single hair of feudal economic base and its superstructure, while zealously propagating feudal culture” and striving to gain a place in propaganda for feudal culture.
Zhang Guimei is such a Wu Xun-type figure. She was born in a peasant family, the fifth child, with her mother having died when she was young. Like Wu Xun begging for learning, after going to Lijiang Huaping to teach in 1996, Zhang Guimei also engaged in begging for “qualifications” to establish the “义学” by piecing together funds, enduring insults, and finally, with “state support,” establishing Huaping Girls’ High School. As a teacher, Zhang Guimei is almost a saint: not only is she as careful as the aforementioned teachers to educate rural children, but even when she suffers uterine fibroids, she continues teaching and “giving back to her homeland”; she is “boundlessly compassionate,” while serving as the director of welfare institutions, donating all her income to raising orphans; she even appears as a “friend of women,” visiting feudal families, recruiting female students, and rescuing countless victims of patriarchy from the mountains… until finally, even the Chinese government included her name and deeds in the “Outline of the People’s Republic of China,” a lasting honor — just like Wu Xun who was honored by the Qing government for opening schools widely because of his promotion of义学.
Wu Xun’s specter could thrive across China because, for nearly five decades, China’s revisionist group seized party power, and the ongoing struggle of the working people made the ruling class fear the people. The capitalist class knew that maintaining state stability — i.e., the stability of the existing ruling order — the greatest threat comes from the people; thus, while expanding police and security apparatuses, it also places great emphasis on ideology to control laboring people. The education industry’s flourishing and Zhang Guimei’s promotion are clear expressions of this form of control.
In such a revolutionary era, it is crucial to recognize what kind of “educators” the Nazi China government extols and what kind of “education” they promote. From a proletarian perspective, teachers are not noble people; they are a special class serving the ruling class’ interests. Education is not an abstract universal virtue; in this regard:
“Education is a vivid reflection of class struggle in a class society, and the essence of the education problem is the problem of training the next generation for a given class. In capitalist society, the ruling bourgeoisie, to preserve its rule, must inevitably train its own successors. ‘However, society is the sum total of the social relations of production at a given historical stage’ (Dictionary of Philosophical Terms), capitalist society is a society of the few exploiting the many, a society of labor exploited without labor, and profit without labor. This feature determines that the exploiters must train their own successors and also enslave more people who can serve the class… In short, it is to train slaves useful to the bourgeoisie so that they can create profits for the bourgeoisie without disturbing its peace and leisure.” (LSEP submission: On the reactionary essence of bourgeois teachers and social interrelations)
In capitalist society, there can be no so-called education programs beneficial to the people. No matter how much the Nazi China education department promotes “quality education” or how hard it pushes to reform the teaching syllabus, the final result will deepen political oversight and thought control over workers and youth, to stifle rebellious ideologies against reformist rule. All existing educational systems cannot possibly oppose their own ruling order when revised by the bourgeoisie. All workers and revolutionary youth should understand that only by breaking entirely with the old education system can capitalism be overthrown, and a new world without exploitation and oppression for all can be created.
The proletariat is the most selfless class. They have no personal profit and face the deepest oppression; without the liberation of all humanity, they cannot liberate themselves. Class identity of the proletariat dictates that they must thoroughly understand the world to reshape it through revolutionary means. Any rhetoric that just glosses over the decaying exploitative class will be condemned by revolutionary masses; any lackeys who serve to preserve the decaying exploitative regime through “exhaustive” work will be shattered by the revolutionary tide, now or in the future.
The self-styled champion of the revisionist group in China, Zhang Guimei, uses every means to praise capitalism and cultivate capitalist successors, while forming close ties with the reformist Nazi government. She has served as a local representative of the People’s Congress, deputy director of the Chinese Women’s Federation, and director of Huaping Children’s Home, and has received various honors issued by the Chinese Nazi government, effectively becoming a member of the exploiters. Therefore, Zhang Guimei’s tireless education of students is not for the sake of the students’ future as claimed by her and the Chinese Nazi government, but to maintain the rule of her class. Her class status is suggested by her economic position:
- She invested more than 1 million yuan of her own prize money and public donations into Huaping Girls’ High School… spent 320,000 yuan on mock exam papers; one student, exhausted by military training, asked for a drink; a few dozen yuan of grass jelly for the entire school’s 500 students are provided by her.
“The means are a clear proof of the mean ends.” In imposing strict discipline, control, and suppression on students, Zhang Guimei is the embodiment of using students as bargaining chips to solidify her own class status; through the subjugation of many students and cultivation of numerous loyal slaves for Nazi China, she has achieved her current position. Although Zhang Guimei proclaims that the girls’ high school “needs to study seven years’ worth of knowledge in three years,” she never relaxes her ideological control, always intending to turn female students into staunch supporters of Nazi China. Freshmen at Huaping Girls’ High must copy the “party constitution,” watch “revolutionary films,” hear “old hero stories,” hold weekly pledges for party membership and youth league, and sing red songs daily. It can be said that the younger generation of workers and peasants in such a school is more likely to be educated into the servitude of the bourgeoisie than to become its creators. Under Zhang Guimei’s limitless praise for Nazi China, the girls are indoctrinated with reactionary ideas of loyalty and filial piety; at home they are grateful to their parents, at school to teachers, in society to the country, after entering the workforce to their employer, treating every lash from the slave owner as a precious gift, and finding beauty in their servitude. After Huaping Girls’ High School’s “education,” even some parents admit that their children no longer argue with them and show more respect for elders.
- What is Zhang Guimei’s Education Essentially
Zhang Guimei has openly stated that the purpose of education is to “pull people out of poverty, make them independent and self-reliant, and enable them to play a role in society.” In her view, teaching and educating is the only way to lead poor students from the mountains to change their fate; and for students to receive education, especially young female students, is a major national plan that can change a person and affect three generations. This ostentatious and righteous-sounding assertion seems correct but ignores the fundamental problem: the extreme imbalance of educational resources between urban and rural areas is inherently irrational; depriving young women of the right to education is an extremely reactionary act; the capitalist system of private ownership of means of production inevitably leads to wealth disparities and the strengthening of patriarchal rule, causing women to completely lose equality with men and even basic rights, becoming household slaves. In the educational field, this manifests as the deprivation of the right to education for the exploiteds—especially women exploited by both private property and patriarchy—although the essence of this education is only a method of domestication and servitude.
Zhang Guimei’s recruitment methods also reflect her worldview. Many affluent “feminists” are moved to tears by her “义举” of taking girls away from feudal parents and praising her as someone who fights against the pervasive feudal ideas in rural areas. This is all a trick. Zhang Guimei’s recruitment of female students is not to oppose feudal parents selling daughters as brides, i.e., as commodities, but to use speculative capitalist logic to make feudal parents believe that early sale of daughters is highly unbeneficial, and only through continued speculation can they extract more value. After enrollment, Zhang Guimei teaches new students to “be grateful and give back,” “life better than a lifetime of living in the mountains,” and that only by leaving the mountains can they live a “beautiful” life. Thus Zhang Guimei not only does not oppose capitalism but sings its praises; she even calls on young mountain women who have suffered under patriarchy to “pay back society,” claiming that “not failing the cultivation of Huaping Girls’ High” is their duty; she urges these women to “contribute to the construction of society with their own strength.” In her view, these oppressed women, after selling themselves and realizing their “commodity value,” have obtained a responsibility to repay society that had oppressed them; after enduring this society’s oppression, it is said that they could help to build a stronger, more powerful system that can enslave more exploited women. This shameless act of women who have suffered capitalist patriarchy turning around to defend capitalist patriarchy is despicable.
With this brainwashing and misrepresentation, plus fascist dictatorial methods (which will be mentioned later), Zhang Guimei repeatedly eliminates, screens, and “cultivates” students who identify with her slave-wage logic. Under her “careful” education, many graduates go on to become teachers back at Huaping Girls’ High, police officers, doctors, or pursue graduate studies… In short, they become the backbone of building Nazi China’s Confucian patriarchal order and China’s “socialist” style, building and reinforcing the decayed system that oppressed them. Zhang Guimei’s behavior ultimately aims to consolidate capitalist rule, to cultivate batch after batch of capitalist successors through day-to-day indoctrination. She claims that students at the girls’ high school “study seven years’ worth of knowledge in three years,” but she never relaxes ideological control, always aiming to turn female students into Nazi China’s steadfast supporters. Entrance to Huaping Girls’ High requires copying the “(pseudo) party constitution,” watching “revolutionary films,” hearing “stories of the martyrs,” weekly reaffirmations of party membership and youth league, and daily red songs. It can be said that in such a school, the young workers and peasants are more being indoctrinated into bourgeois servitude than educated; they become capable of creating profits for the bourgeoisie without disturbing their peace, as Lenin said in The Tasks of the Young Communist League. Zhang Guimei’s unlimited praise of Nazi China led female students to adopt reactionary ideas of loyalty and filial piety, being grateful to parents at home, to teachers at school, to the country in society, and to bosses after entering the workforce, thereby making masters see every lash as a precious gift and ultimately finding beauty in servitude. After Huaping Girls’ High School’s “education,” even some parents admitted that their children no longer talk back to them and show more respect to elders.
- Zhang Guimei’s Methods and Aims
To maintain fascist dictatorship, one must rely on fascist means. At Huaping Girls’ High, Zhang Guimei often appears as “Mother Zhang.” She eats and lives with students in appearances of a benevolent mother, but in practice she wears the banner of “doing what’s best for the students,” treating students as slaves, both mentally and physically, to the limit. Besides a 40-minute lunch break, Huaping Girls’ High students have no right to rest; meal times and dishwashing times are strictly limited to within 15 minutes, and even a single extra second brings harsh reprimand. Every morning at 5:30, students must rise, run, and engage in morning reading under loud broadcasts, and until 12:20 a.m., when self-study ends, there is no rest. Such regime infuriates students, who even angrily curse Zhang Guimei as a “pernickety skin.”
Fundamentally, Zhang Guimei is the collective of these old parents, performing as their agent to raise the “commodity value” of the girls; she has become the mother of all the female students, substituting for feudal parents to manage these girls. She uses similar methods on Huaping Girls’ High’s teachers. Teachers at Huaping Girls’ High live like the students and have little chance to take leave; even when allowed, they face Zhang Guimei’s “isolation.” In the early days of the school, Zhang Guimei required teachers to wake up at five o’clock and clean the entire building, and then to accompany students with the same routine for intense classes. This made even the mildest and most dutiful teachers, who belonged to the working noble class, intolerable, causing many to resign in protest of her exploitation.
At this point, some readers may ask, “From the news, Zhang Guimei lives a frugal life and works hard for education; isn’t that undeniable?” It should be sternly pointed out: “A person is the sum total of all social relations.” From the height of class struggle, where the exploiters’ wealth goes matters little, because their every action is to consolidate their own class’ rule and serve their class interests. Just as the feudal landlords’ simple, hardworking life is not related to exploiting peasants, Zhang Guimei’s personal life is a secondary issue — because whether simple or frenzied, she represents a certain class relation. In general, she embodies the “economic dimension of the person” as an actor bearing definite class relations and interests (Marx, Capital).
As the Chinese reformist group’s booster, Zhang Guimei uses every means to praise capitalism, to cultivate capitalist successors, and has formed close ties with the Nazi government. She has served as a local People’s Congress representative, deputy director of the All-China Women’s Federation, and director of Huaping Children’s Home, winning honors from China’s Nazi government and effectively becoming a member of the exploited class. The reason for Zhang Guimei’s relentless “education” of students is not to help the students’ future, but to maintain the ruling class. Her class status is evident in her economic position:
- She invested more than 1 million yuan of her own prize money and public donations into Huaping Girls’ High School… spent 320,000 on high school practice tests; one student, exhausted by military training, asked for a drink; a few dozen yuan of grass jelly for all 500 students are provided by her, etc.
“The mean of means proves the mean ends.” In imposing strict control, management, and oppression among students, Zhang Guimei demonstrates that she uses students as chips to reinforce her own class status; by indoctrinating many students and training numerous loyal slaves for Nazi China, she has gained her current standing. Although Zhang Guimei proclaims that the school’s motto is “three years of study for seven years of knowledge,” she has never relaxed the ideological control of the girls’ school, always aspiring to turn the girls into unwavering supporters of Nazi China. New students at Huaping Girls’ High first copy the “(pseudo) party constitution,” then watch “revolutionary films,” hear “stories of the martyrs,” hold a weekly pledge ceremony of joining the party and the league, and sing red songs every day. In short, the younger generation at such a school is more likely to be educated into bourgeois servitude rather than educated; they become capable of creating profits for the bourgeoisie without disturbing bourgeois peace and leisure. Lenin’s The Tasks of the Young Communist League notes that under Zhang Guimei’s unlimited praise for Nazi China, the girls at the high school have been indoctrinated with reactionary ideas of loyalty and filial piety; at home they are grateful to parents, at school grateful to teachers, in society to the country, upon joining the workforce to their employers, treating every lash as a precious gift, and finding beauty in a life of servitude. After Huaping Girls’ High School’s education, even some parents admit their children no longer talk back to them and show greater respect for the elderly.
- Zhang Guimei’s Broad Social Impact
Zhang Guimei once said, “The value of my life lies in having saved a generation; whether many or few, they ended up doing better than me.” In reality, Zhang Guimei’s role is not about “saving,” but about destroying. Her “salvation” is merely moving countless young students—especially young women—from one crucible to another, making them accept the bourgeois worldview and ultimately become loyal servants of capitalism. Like Wu Xun, she waved a tattered banner: “Unprecedented independence, benevolence and righteousness, without guilt for enduring hardships” (Jiang Jieshi’s Praise of Wu Xun). Her declarations and actions in Huaping Girls’ High make the school’s motto most representative:
- I was born to be a high mountain, not a stream; I will look down on mediocrity from the summit of peaks.
- I was born a remarkable person, not a blade of grass; I stand on the shoulders of great people, looking down on the humble.
To train students to identify with the logic that exploitation and oppression are reasonable and revolution is unreasonable, Zhang Guimei’s approach always emphasizes the doctrine of social Darwinism, preaching that success is for the strong and that the hardworking will rise, while challenging the roots of suffering is unnecessary. These ideas are not new; they are a revival of Confucian sentiments that “the diligent govern the people; the powerful govern the strong.” Zhang Guimei and Wu Xun share the same backward doctrine: both are devout Confucians, insisting that laboring people are inherently inferior and that the exploiters are inherently great—extremist, anti-human, anti-revolutionary rhetoric.
The broad student demographic in this system is already detached from productive labor, with bourgeois opium of the mind and this reactionary education corrupting them. They become naive, cunning, weak, selfish, incompetent, and arrogant; they are slaves who dream of becoming masters. They are exploited by capitalism, yet support the logic that exploitation is just. Lenin’s Tasks of the Youth League states: “Old schools are schools of dead reading; they force people to learn a lot of useless, burdensome, dead knowledge, filling the brains of the youth and turning them into bureaucratic molds.” The Nazi China’s betrayers push Zhang Guimei to educate numerous “elite” capitalists in large-scale bourgeois educational institutions.
To publicize this contemporary Wu Xun, the Nazi China regime filmed a movie about Zhang Guimei. Yet this epic, titled I Am from the Mountain, faced widespread resistance and failed at the box office, failing to reach the legacy of Wu Xun’s film. The fiercest opponents of the film were bourgeois “democrats” and “feminists.” However, these so-called progressives focused their criticisms on Zhang Guimei’s alleged portrayal as a “feminist hero” who fights patriarchy and remains faithful to the Party. The film shows her as a woman who wants to break away from her husband’s shadow, distorting her “belief in the Party” and the image of independent women. Yet as noted earlier, Zhang Guimei is not a feminist. Whether it is turning countless young female students into capitalist patriarchy’s followers or advocating for graduates to “build society” and contribute to social development, it shows she defends and consolidates capitalist rule and defends China’s most brutal Confucian patriarchal society, betraying women. The so-called “progressives” who defend Zhang Guimei in this way are not actually anti-capitalist; they merely offer verbal protests against patriarchy and eventually end up cheering for patriarchy. They do not oppose capitalism as a system.
Moreover, claiming that Zhang Guimei is an “excellent communist party member” is even more absurd. If such a loyal dog for reformist China’s system could be exempt from the stigma of being a reformist and named a “communist,” then Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping would also deserve the title of “excellent party member.” Zhang Guimei cannot be an “excellent party member” of the Communist Party. All true Marxists must recognize that praising such ugliness in public or shouting “serve the people” as a revolutionary banner is to treat reactionary propaganda as legitimate.
- Breaking with Old Education
Zhang Guimei began promoting girls’ education at the turn of this century and only recently gained wide renown and historical notoriety. China today as a social imperialist power is dominated by wealth on one end and poverty, labor exploitation, and oppression on the other; extreme social oppression has provoked intense mass struggle, and the ruling class fears it. Nazi bureaucrats know that maintaining national stability depends on suppressing the masses, so they increasingly expand police and security forces and also intensify ideological control over the masses. The education industry, along with Zhang Guimei’s praise, is a significant manifestation of this control.
In such a revolutionary era, it is essential for revolutionary masses to understand who the “educators” promoted by the Nazi China government actually are, and what the “education” promoted by Nazi China is. In proletarian terms, teachers are not noble, but a special social class that enforces a certain class will and serves a definite class. Education is not an abstract universal virtue; in this sense:
“Education is the vivid reflection of class struggle in a class society; the essence of the education problem is the problem of training successors for a given class. In capitalist society, the ruling bourgeoisie, to preserve its rule, must train its successors. ‘However, society is the sum total of historical stage-specific relations of production’ (Dictionary of Philosophical Terms). Capitalist society is a society where a few exploit the many, a society of labor exploited for profit without labor. This feature determines that the exploiters must train their own successors and enslave more people who can serve their class… In short, it is to train slaves useful to the bourgeoisie so that they can create profits for the bourgeoisie without disturbing its peace and leisure (The Tasks of the Young Communist League).” (LSEP submission: On the reactionary essence of bourgeois teachers and social interrelations)
In capitalist society, there cannot be a so-called education program beneficial to the people. No matter how much Nazi China’s education department promotes “quality education” or vigorously advocates reforming teaching curricula, the final result will be to deepen ideological control over the laboring people and youth in order to choke the thought of opposing reformist rule. All existing educational systems cannot possibly oppose their own ruling order when revised by the bourgeoisie. All workers and revolutionary youths should realize that only by breaking completely with the old education system can capitalism be overthrown, and a new world without anyone exploiting or oppressing others be created.
The proletariat is the most selfless, and has no personal gains; without the liberation of the entire humanity, it cannot liberate itself. The class stance of the proletariat determines that they must thoroughly understand the world to reform it through revolutionary means. Any rhetoric that flatters the decaying exploitative class will be rejected by the revolutionary masses; any lackey who serves to maintain the decaying exploitative regime will inevitably be crushed by the revolutionary tide, now or in the future.
To publicize this contemporary Wu Xun, Zhang Guimei’s hawkish anti-revolutionary stance has continued in China’s education system. The Communist Party of China and the Nazi government both promote this education with similar rhetoric: “Education is an instrument for shaping the future of the people.” Yet the truth remains: Zhang Guimei’s actions are not those of a feminist; they are the opposite of the emancipation of women. She is a betrayer of the vast female masses, and those who defend her with praise and defend the claim that she helps women’s liberation, are in truth supporting a distorted social order that degrades women.
All that remains is to call for breaking with old education systems and creating a new education that serves the people, not the exploitative class.
- Conclusion: Break with Old Education
Zhang Guimei began her campaign to promote girls’ education at the start of this century and recently gained significant recognition. This reveals the deep-seated class root of her efforts. China today, a social imperialist power, sits at the extreme ends of wealth accumulation and poverty, labor oppression and enslavement. The severe oppression has spurred fierce resistance from the workers, and the regime fears this. Nazi bureaucrats understand that maintaining state stability — the stability of the existing ruling order — requires both coercive state power and ideological control over the masses. The education industry’s growth and Zhang Guimei’s extreme praise are clear evidence of this form of control.
In such a revolutionary era, it is vital for revolutionary masses to clearly identify who the “educators” promoted by the Nazi China government are and what the “education” promoted by Nazi China actually is. From the perspective of the proletariat, teachers are not noble persons; they are a special class that carries out the will of a given class and serves that class. Education is not an abstract universal virtue. In this sense:
- Education is a vivid reflection of class struggle in a class society; the essence of education is the problem of training the successors of a class. In capitalist society, the ruling bourgeoisie, to preserve its rule, must train its own successors. “Society is the sum total of the historical stage’s relations of production; capitalist society is a society where a few exploit many, a society of labor exploited without labor, and profit without labor. This characteristic determines that the exploiters must train their own successors and enslave more people who can serve the class… In short, it is to train useful slaves for the bourgeoisie, who can create profits for the bourgeoisie without disturbing the bourgeoisie’s peace and leisure” (from The Tasks of the Young Communist League).
In capitalist society, there can be no education program beneficial to the people. No matter how much Nazi China’s education department promotes “quality education” or reforming syllabi, the final result will be further political oppression of the laboring people and youth to suppress anti-reformist thought. All existing education systems cannot possibly oppose their ruling order when revised by the bourgeoisie. All workers and reformist youth must realize that only by breaking completely with the old education system can capitalism be overthrown and a new world free from exploitation be created.
The proletariat is the most selfless class; they have no personal interest, and without the liberation of all humankind, they cannot liberate themselves. The class character of the proletariat determines that they must thoroughly understand the world to transform it through revolutionary means. Any rhetoric that praises the exploitation of the laboring masses and the oppression of women under the decaying global empire will be condemned by revolutionary masses; any lackey who serves to preserve the decaying exploitative regime will be crushed by the tides of history, now or in the future.