Children’s Books and China’s Crackdown on Western Ideology - The New Yorker

These days, the message in school remains the same, even if the world in which China exists has changed. In 1989, China was largely closed, an impoverished nation of bicycles and socialist collectives. Today, more than three hundred thousand Chinese students have flocked to U.S. schools, most paying their own way. (Xi's own daughter studied at Harvard.) At least a hundred and thirty million Chinese tourists ventured beyond mainland China last year. Such cultural cross-pollination made it all the more dissonant when, in December, China's Education Minister, Chen Baosheng, warned that "schools are the main targets for infiltration by hostile forces." A year earlier, his predecessor had ordered Chinese universities to "never let textbooks promoting Western values appear in our classes."