In his excellent book Tombstone, Yang Jisheng relates what it was like to actually live through the monstrous crime of the Great Leap Forward. As an estimated 40 million of their fellow citizens starved to death, most Chinese had no idea it was even happening. How did the Mao regime even get away with it?
Propaganda.
Information was tightly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Even when Yang’s father died of starvation, “I believed that what was happening in my home village was isolated, and that my father’s death was merely one family’s tragedy”. There were powerful incentives not to question Party propaganda, of course: the struggle sessions which saw helpless victims beaten and shot in front of crowds coralled at gunpoint for the purpose.
But the strongest weapon was ignorance and ceaseless propaganda.
Today, the CCP still venerates Mao, the monster whose tally of murder makes even Hitler’s pale by comparison. They’re also still relentlessly propagandising.
Even in Australian schools.
There are warnings Australian schoolchildren are being indoctrinated with Chinese Communist Party propaganda in taxpayer-subsidised community language schools.
Critics have told Sky News Australia students in the schools are being taught to express loyalty to China over Australia.
Dr Lin Bin has been working as a principal in Chinese community language schools in Sydney for 15 years.
According to Dr Lin, many teachers in such schools are CCP members, and CCP operatives keep a careful eye on the curricula. Dr Lin was removed from a Chinese language school in south Sydney, at the behest of the Chinese consulate.
“I believe the Australian government has got limited knowledge about CCP interference,” Dr Lin said.
“I’m concerned about these schools because they use teaching material from China and it only provides the point of view from the CCP.”
But he says the most concerning elements of the schools were the teachers themselves – many of whom are Chinese nationals – and activities the students are encouraged to participate in, including poetry competitions and camps in China that are subsidised by the Chinese government.
These are not separate, independent schools. Like “Confucius Centres” in Australian universities, these CCP propaganda farms piggy-back on the Australian public school system — and on the Australian taxpayer’s dime.
There are 125 Chinese community language schools in NSW that are hosted in public school classrooms during after-school hours and on weekends.
Each school is eligible for NSW Education Department grants of $2,500 to establish a campus and grants of up to $10,000 for teaching materials and training activities.
So, what are they taught in these “schools”?
The students refer to China being the “motherland” and “mother”, language critics say is consistent with CCP propaganda.
The same school’s website features essays written in Mandarin by students who attended a winter camp in the Chinese province Hunan, which praise the founder of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong, a man who is estimated to have killed as many as 100 million people.
In one essay, a student writes that after a visit to Mao’s hometown, he felt he was previously “ignorant” about a leader he has since learned was misrepresented by foreigners, calling him a “great figure”.
Sky News Australia
Such propaganda is almost indistinguishable from the sort of brainwashing stuff peddled by the regime in China itself.
[Arthur Wang] remembered reading stories from textbooks about Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members during the historic Long March in 1934-1935 that led to Mao Zedong becoming the leader of the party.
He also recalled learning about the soldiers who lost their lives during China’s anti-Japanese war in the 1930s.
As histories such as Jung Chang’s and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story, and Frank Dikotter’s The Tragedy of Liberation show, official propaganda about the Long March is riddled with lies. During the Japanese occupation, the CCP rarely fought the invaders and in fact devoted considerable energy to undermining the Nationalists who were.
But if Yang grew up under the suffocating pall of propaganda during the Great Leap Forward, that’s nothing compared to the thoroughgoing brainwashing program enacted after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the fall of Soviet communism.
China has a long history of ideological teachings, but its compulsory patriotic education curriculum was systematically rolled out in 1994 […]
The ideological teaching also goes beyond the classroom.
ABC Australia
In particular, young Chinese are thoroughly primed to react with anger whenever the regime is criticised, without bothering to try and find out whether the criticism is true or not.
The security implications for Australia are clear. Should sabre-rattling push ever come to shove with China, how will the tens of thousands of Chinese nationals and Mainland Chinese emigres respond? Ask swimmer Mack Horton, who was subjected to a long campaign of violent harassment for challenging Chinese swimmers on doping.