A morals campaign in China

The current late spring moral offensive in China seems to have reached a peak moment during a Hu speech to the central government on May 10 in Beijing, sources say. Hu's subject was "strengthening youth morals." The speech was partly reproduced in an education ministry memo released June 1 by the state council and circulated to all public school principals with the title "Suggestions."

Among the memo's suggestions were the reintroduction of practices in China that date to 1949. They included the idea that all students participate in daily flag raisings, and that they spend 20 days a year visiting military bases, factories, and villages. Large meetings to discuss Hu's talk were encouraged, as were student efforts to organize oral history meetings with the aging revolutionaries of the 1940s and 50s.

Hu urged state and party members at the May 10 meeting to study "how to continue using Marxism as a compass," and how to show youth to do the same. "Hu Jintao and Chinese leaders have not given up on the socialist ideal of 'the new man' entirely," says a Western scholar in Beijing. "They don't want to concede that China, or the party, has completely left socialism."

Yet the pace of change in China makes the task a daunting one.

The Chinese have pursued the "get rich" goal hammer and tongs, if not hammer and sickle. Last year the country recorded the sale of 2.4 million autos. This week at a much-talked about luxury auto show in Beijing, James Wang, a 27-year old sporting-goods supplier purchased a $900,000 stretch limo.

"The message that sends out is that you are only someone if you have money and power," one long time Beijing resident argues.

Concern over a "money at any cost" mentality has surfaced in a spate of public health stories here about food and milk supplemented with cheap additives in order to make an extra profit.

Some critics say that in some modern states the moral regulation Chinese leaders wish to reinforce often emerges from the society itself. Yet in China there has rarely been independent mediating structures between the people and the state, the kind of diverse voluntary organizations that make up civil society. A new mercantile class in China may be rising. But the cohort is small.For the time being, the party itself mandates the "ideological morals" needed, to use the phrase given by Premier Wen Jiabao this spring.

Other mandates this spring: Colleges are requiring students to sign oaths stating they won't cheat. Provincial party leaders must identify "model" behavior - the best athletes, students, workers, colleagues, and so on.

TV hosts in China in April were told they could no longer dye their hair any color but black. Public figures have been urged to cease using verbal expressions popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan, including words like "OK" or "bye bye" - that are also in widespread use on the mainland.

In Shanghai, six local news bureaus were shut and several journalists dismissed in an effort to avoid what one editor described as "too many sensitive stories." In Beijing in May, some 4,000 journalists from Xinhua and journalism students from local colleges were required to attend a meeting announced the same day. The message as told by one attendee: "We were reminded that no matter whom we worked for, we were still Chinese, that we owed our jobs to the nation."

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