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- WORLD, Page 27World NotesCHINAMaking the Marxist Grade
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- As Beijing's 67 universities opened for a new term last
- week, the mood on campus was strictly back to basics --
- Communist basics. Two months after the bloody suppression of the
- student prodemocracy movement, the authorities are putting new
- emphasis on "political re-education." At Beijing Teachers
- College and other former hotbeds of student protest, incoming
- freshmen reported a month early for a required refresher course
- on Deng Xiaoping's speeches.
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- Hardest hit was Peking University, where the entire class
- of 811 students has been ordered to spend its first year not on
- the spacious city campus but at a spartan military academy 1,260
- miles south of Beijing, where the curriculum will be heavily
- weighted in favor of discipline and party ideology. Said an
- angry teacher: "The government probably thinks it can change the
- minds of young people in this manner so that they will avoid
- being troublemakers in the future." Some face a particularly
- grueling ideological brush-up. The State Education Commission
- has ruled that all graduates since 1985 must spend a year
- working in the countryside or in a factory.
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