One of Britain’s top public schools is set to open six offshoots in
China teaching the Chinese national curriculum at a time when the
country’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, is pushing to tighten the
Communist party’s grip on the classroom.british school in china
According to the Financial Times, Westminster School will on
Thursday unveil plans to create branches in six major Chinese cities in
partnership with a Hong Kong education group called HKMETG. The first
will open in Chengdu, capital of the south-western province of Sichuan,
in 2020.
Westminster, whose alumni include politicians such as Tony Benn and
Nick Clegg as well as Martin Amis, Helena Bonham Carter and Louis
Theroux, described the move as a “soft power” initiative that would help
fund a bursary scheme in the UK.“The reason for opening the schools is
that we’re quite excited about being able to influence education of
Chinese pupils in China,” a spokeswoman said.
Westminster, which was founded in 1179 by Benedictine monks, is the
latest in a series of British schools to head east. Dulwich College,
Harrow and Wellington all operate spin-offs for international students
in Shanghai, with Dulwich also boasting campuses in Beijing and Suzhou
and a franchise in the southern city of Zhuhai.
Unusually, however, the Westminster schools will reportedly teach China’s national curriculum to 6- to 15-year-olds.
Xiong Bingqi, an education specialist from Shanghai’s Jiaotong
University, told the Guardian that was the only way Chinese authorities
would allow a foreign school to offer Chinese students compulsory
education.
However, as a result teachers are likely to skirt over politically
sensitive topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, in which Chinese
troops gunned down an unknown number of civilians, and Mao’s Great
Famine, in which tens of millions died.
Chinese textbooks have grown increasingly pro-party since Xi took
power in 2012 and set in motion a severe political chill that has seen
academics forced into exile and critics jailed.
In August, China’s assistant education minister, Zheng Fuzhi,
unveiled a new generation of party-sanctioned textbooks designed to push
Xi’s so-called “core socialist values” and reinforce Beijing’s claims
over places such as Tibet, Taiwan and the South China Sea.
One recent command to schools pronounced that pupils should be
“guided to firmly support the CPC [Chinese Communist party]
leadership”.Last December Xi said universities should be strongholds of
party rule and teachers “engineers of the human soul” whose “sacred
mission” was to help students improve their ideological quality.
Steve Tsang, the head of the School of Oriental and African Studies’
(SOAS) China Institute, told the Financial Times he believed
Westminster was making a mistake.
“I think they have no idea what they’re dealing with … If you set up
a school in China, they will have a party secretary superintending the
whole school and the party secretary will be responsible for political
education.”
Xiong said it was normal for Beijing to require a foreign school to
operate under Chinese rules: “Even if you are running a school in the
US, you need to obey local education laws and regulations.”
He said there would be greater flexibility outside the period of
compulsory education, although not when it came to ideologically or
historically sensitive topics. “Teaching anything in history class that
is different from what is in Chinese textbooks, that’s impossible.”
Westminster is likely to have to modify its motto, as well as its
teaching materials, before opening in one-party China, an officially
atheist country. The school’s motto is currently: “Dat deus incrementum”
or ‘God gives bounteously”.
