8
‘Selecting the Refined and Discarding the Dross’
The Post-1990 Chinese Leadership’s Attitude Towards Cultural Tradition
China, in many regards, has become a country of profound contradictions: an ostensibly Marxist-socialist country experiencing massive economic growth caused by stark capitalist policies; a nation where cultural politics underlie the complexities of presenting a unified nation in the face of great and often tense diversity; and a ruling party striving to reorient its relationship with the past that it had once brutally suppressed. Over the past four decades, few countries in Asia have had as complicated a relationship with their cultural heritage as China. Recent events of international stature such as the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and the 2010 Expo in Shanghai were saturated in references to the rich and long history of Chinese culture and tradition. However, as I discuss in this chapter, the positioning of culture and heritage – phrased here as ‘traditional culture’ based upon how it is identified in official discourse at the upper levels of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – is a highly politicised and strategic effort.
In this chapter, I draw heavily upon statements made by the upper levels of the CCP leadership and intellectual elite to illustrate the official state level discourse on heritage to both domestic and international audiences. When studying China, it is essential to follow the official statements by the party leadership, as it is through such carefully programmed statements that the ideas and directions of the party are disseminated. I focus especially on such high level public discourse as a way of understanding how the party thinks about and uses cultural heritage. My perspective comes from a political analysis of the use of tradition in China, in particular how it is being used by the central party to further both its domestic and international agenda.
Since the 1990s, the CCP leadership has shown a renewed interest in China’s cultural traditions, which can be seen in the increasing public statements related to culture and heritage by senior party leaders. In his speech at the conference to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the establishment of the CCP, then-president Jiang Zemin stressed the CCP’s appreciation for China’s cultural tradition. Jiang said that the CCP ‘should inherit and develop China’s cultural tradition’ and that the CCP ‘should not support national nihilism or total Westernization’ (Jiang 1994: 1). Additionally, in his speech at Harvard University during his US visit in November 1997, Jiang emphasised the importance of China’s cultural tradition. He said it was a constructive factor in unifying the Chinese nation. Jiang also said that ‘China’s cultural tradition has become a strong bond for ethnic harmony and national unity’ (Jiang 1997: 1).
Since Hu Jintao came to power, the trend of reconsidering cultural tradition has continued. In his speech at Yale University in April 2006, President Hu Jintao dwelled extensively on the tradition of Chinese culture and history. Hu stressed how ‘China embarks on the road of peaceful development because of Chinese historical and traditional culture’ (Hu 2006: 1). This was truly significant, as it was a clear indication of the CCP’s recognition of the importance of China’s cultural tradition and a statement meant to be heard in the international arena.
This official interest in China’s cultural tradition looks odd at first glance, especially given the widely-held knowledge of the CCP’s harsh condemnation of China’s cultural tradition during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). However, it should be pointed out that contrary to conventional belief, Mao Zedong’s attitude towards cultural heritage prior to the Cultural Revolution was in part accepting and critical, rather than just negative and destructive; it was also a stance that was fairly well thought out. Mao Zedong articulated his attitude in an article published in 1938 entitled: The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War. On the subject of applying the theory of Marxism-Leninism in the contemporary circumstances of China, Mao emphasised the role of Chinese tradition. From Mao’s point of view, China’s cultural tradition could be a guide to the revolutionary movement of the CCP. Mao said:
Our national history goes back several thousand years and has its own characteristics and innumerable treasures. But in these matters we are mere schoolboys. Contemporary China has grown out of the China of the past; we are Marxist in our historical approach and must not lop off our history. We should sum up our history from Confucius to Sun Yat-sen and take over this valuable legacy. This is important for guiding the great movement of today.
(Mao 1967b: 210)
In his article On New Democracy, published in January 1940, Mao Zedong further developed his thoughts on China’s cultural tradition. Mao reaffirmed China’s cultural tradition as a highly praiseworthy and respectable asset to the state, but he did not embrace China’s cultural tradition completely. Mao advocated a critical attitude towards China’s cultural tradition summed up in this statement: ‘reject its feudal dross and assimilate its democratic essence’ (Mao 1940: 282). Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Mao Zedong’s policy of inheriting and adopting China’s cultural tradition became an officially advocated guideline. However, such policies got completely lost in the tumultuous period of the Cultural Revolution, as more and more elements of tradition were linked with reactionary tendencies and targeted for destruction. Recently, this approach to tradition has been again embraced by the party leadership, which has profound impacts on the state’s relationship with cultural heritage throughout China.
There has been a conspicuous shift in the CCP leadership’s attitude towards China’s cultural tradition post-1990. With official references at the highest levels of the party to China’s cultural tradition growing at a rapid pace, it is important for this official interest to be conceptualised, examined and evaluated. This chapter explores the CCP leadership’s attitude towards China’s cultural tradition since the 1990s. It starts with an examination of the ambiguity of the CCP’s interpretation of China’s cultural tradition and proceeds to analyse the reasons for the leadership’s interest in using the concept of China’s cultural tradition.
The Ambiguity of the CCP’s Interpretation of China’s Cultural Tradition
Since the 1990s, there has been a public consensus among China’s top bureaucrats that China’s cultural tradition includes all the ‘refined traditional values’ that manifest in Chinese history. For instance, in a speech at Harvard University in December 2003, Premier Wen Jiabao made a significant reference with regard to China’s cultural tradition. Wen said:
‘From Confucius to Dr. Sun Yat-sen, China’s cultural tradition presents many precious ideas and qualities, which are essentially democratic. For example, they lay stress on the importance of kindness and love in human relations, on the interest of the community, on seeking harmony without uniformity and on the idea that the world is for all’.
(Lüet al. 2003: 3)
President Hu Jintao, in a speech at Yale University on 21 April 2006, referred to the main contents of China’s cultural tradition. Hu said:
‘The Chinese civilization has always shown respect to people and respect for people’s dignity and value; the Chinese civilization has always given prominence to unremitting self-improvement, reform and innovation; the Chinese civilization has always given prominence to social harmony, unity and mutual assistance; and the Chinese civilization has always given prominence to good neighbourliness’.
(Lan et al. 2006: 1)
Additionally, Gao Zhanxiang, then-Minister of Culture, in his book Cultural Power, says: ‘China’s cultural tradition is about cultivating one’s morality, unifying one’s family, managing state affairs, and bring[ing] world peace’ (Gao 2007: 8).
One may argue that the ambiguity of this definition results from the difficulty of defining China’s rich heritage. This is a country with the world’s longest history of continuous statehood, which covers a large geographic area and includes an incredible diversity of cultures. As Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders argue, it is necessary to discuss what belongs to the broadly-defined China’s traditional culture sphere (Ding and Saunders 2006). In addition to the body of academic literature on the subject, produced both by Chinese and outside scholars, China has by far the largest amount of World Heritage sites of any country in Asia. Out of the total of forty listed, thirty-two of these fall under the framework of ‘cultural’ or ‘mixed’ sites. Such sites span a wide range of archaeological and cultural sites and there has been increasing talk about intangible cultural heritage as well. However, in spite of the obvious list of heritage sites and practices that are known in China, in the official discourse, the CCP has long kept its discussions of cultural heritage focusing upon value systems phrased in ambiguous language. I argue that this is part of an intentional strategy which allows the CCP to use and appropriate cultural heritage in ways that are most advantageous for the party and to provide the substance for a national level rhetoric needed to both support the CCP and fill in the moral holes left by the fading of Marxism as one of the main national talking points.
In his book The Past in Ruins, David Gross discusses the process of ‘refunctioning’ whereby a tradition is ‘lifted out of its previous setting, reconceptualized, and invested with meanings different from those it carried earlier’ (Gross 1992: 107). Like the refunctioning of cultural tradition in general, the CCP has lifted certain elements of China’s cultural tradition and given them meanings different from those they had earlier. This use (or misuse) of heritage by governments is well documented in the heritage literature (Smith 2006; Graham and Howard 2008; etc.). Power structures have long tried to support themselves, establish their legitimacy and jurisdiction and justify their actions through recourse to the past. By portraying itself as the custodian of tradition, the CCP is able to promote its own version of ‘traditional Chinese values’ that promotes love for the country, nation and state, and loyalty to the government and to the CCP. To this extent, China’s cultural tradition is deemed by the CCP to be a means to an end rather than intrinsically valuable.
This is reflected in the fact that the party has transferred its interest in and endorsement of Confucianism to ‘China’s cultural tradition’. As Makeham has pointed out, senior party figures of the regime in 1994, such as Li Lanqing, Gu Mu and Jiang Zemin were prepared to give Confucianism a role in moral education, however, this support did not translate into a specific endorsement of Confucianism in policy documents (Makeham 2003: 311). This was first reflected in policy documents on moral education, such as Outline of Educational Reforms and Developments in the People’s Republic of China,1 Resolution of the CCP Central Committee Concerning Some Major Issues in Building a Socialist Psycho-spiritual Civilization2 and Guidelines for Implementing the Enhancement of Civic Morality (Makeham 2008: 313). These government documents referred to the significance of educating the Chinese in ‘China’s refined and excellent cultural tradition’ in establishing a socialist system with Chinese characteristics. Such efforts show the systematic ways in which the CCP has grounded broader national projects within a language of morality that is derived from the past.
The CCP has played a careful balancing act with regard to its support for Confucianism. In part, it has used certain elements of Confucianism to support a moral framework that falls in line with the party’s aims – such as hard work, filial piety and respect for authority. However, in addition to being in direct contradiction to its earlier attack on Confucianism, the CCP was highly sceptical of the arguments of liberal political Confucianism put forward by Kang Xiaoguang and Jiang Qing (Kang 2005, Kang 2003, Jiang 1989, Jiang 2003). From the perspective of the CCP, these arguments encouraged a liberal and transparent political system under the principle of Confucianism and would undermine the CPP’s rule of China. Therefore, the party withdrew its direct support for Confucianism and only retained the aspects that were most palatable for their agenda. The CCP’s overt support for Confucianism faded away and was replaced by support for China’s ‘cultural tradition’ as publicly defined by leaders and scholars highly positioned within the party. Like Confucianism, CCP’s promotion of China’s cultural tradition can be seen as a political tactic and is equally subject to the needs of the CCP.
The fact that China’s cultural tradition is deemed a political tool is also evident in the CCP’s critical guidelines for re-evaluating China’s cultural tradition. These guidelines are borrowed from Mao Zedong’s theory of critically inheriting China’s cultural tradition, which is to ‘select the refined and discard the dross’. The post-1990 CCP leaderships have adopted the same approach of critical inheritance towards cultural heritage. At a national conference, Jiang Zemin put forward the way to inherit China’s cultural tradition as ‘selecting the essence and discarding the dross’ (Jiang 1994: 1). In 1999, in a symposium to commemorate the 2550th anniversary of Confucius’ birth, Li Tieying said: ‘we should study China’s cultural tradition under the principle of Marxist materialism and the principle of critical inheritance’ (Wang 1999: 4). More recently, Hu’s report to the Seventeenth National Congress of the CCP has emphasised critical evaluation of China’s cultural tradition. The report says: ‘We must understand comprehensively China’s cultural tradition, keep its essence, and discard its dross to enable it to fit in with the present-day society’ (Hu 2007).
This has led to a situation in which official support for cultural heritage has centred around the elements that are most directly aligned with CCP’s priorities – the refined – and excluded those that might prove to be inconvenient – the dross – creating an array of obvious but largely unchallenged contradictions. The Forbidden Palace is one of the great landmarks of China, an architectural wonder heavily promoted by the state as a tourist destination, but it is also the product of centuries of feudal rule that was directly opposed by the CCP and no doubt saturated with ‘feudal dross’. The Great Wall, which for centuries served to keep out those threatening to invade China, is one of the most visited sites in China. However, large sections of China that lie outside the walls are bound to China in a forced marriage that many are unhappy about. Temples throughout China are being conserved and promoted as tourist sites, while at the same time the party is far less tolerant of some religious groups and practices. Natural heritage sites are prominently displayed against the backdrop of massive environmental damage caused by China’s economic development. It is clear that there are serious efforts from the highest levels of government to promote aspects of Chinese cultural heritage. However, it is also clear that the selection and promotion reflects contemporary social, economic and political agendas and it often filled with uncomfortable contradictions that are being glossed over. While in the early days of the CCP rule, the dross defined through a Marxist lens was discarded; since the 1990s it has become much more common for the dross to be glossed over, with the convenient elements retained.
The Reasons for Official Interest in China’s Cultural Tradition
The Demand for Internal Legitimacy
Domestically, I believe that the official re-evaluation of China’s cultural tradition is part of the party’s desire to legitimise the ‘socialist rule’ of a capitalist economy and control the disintegration of Marxism as a political/social movement. China remains a socialist power that adheres to the doctrine of Marxist-Maoism in name, but in practice, Marxist-Maoism has lost a lot of its influence in China. The CCP no longer runs a planned economy: since 1978, the party has gradually introduced a capitalist economy in China. The CCP also no longer emphasises proletarian rule. On 14 November 2002, a significant amendment to the party’s constitution was adopted by the Sixteenth National Congress of the CCP. This amendment said that the CCP was not only the vanguard of the Chinese working class but also the vanguard of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation (Anonymous 2007). Since then, the participation of capitalists in the CCP has been legitimised. The CCP no longer mentions the importance of revolution. Instead, the idea of harmony is highlighted. Since Hu Jintao came into power, speeches by the party’s leadership have been filled with calls for harmony. The Beijing Olympic opening ceremony also suggests that the CCP is distancing itself from its revolutionary history. The CCP no longer mentions class struggle. The term, jieji (class), has been replaced by the other Chinese term, jieceng (stratum), in the government-censored mass media (He 2007). As Daniel A. Bell points out in his book China’s New Confucianism, ‘hardly anybody really believes that Marxism should provide guidelines for thinking about China’s political future. The ideology has been so discredited by its misuses that it has lost almost all legitimacy in society’ (Bell 2008: 8).
This creates a situation in which the major tenets of the party have become obsolete. The party has managed this transition far better than most of the other formerly communist countries and it has done so without major changes in the ruling party that defined the transitions in the former Soviet Union. It seems that the only remotely plausible justification for communist leadership of a market economy at present is that it is ‘a temporary necessity given the need to provide social order during the disruptive period of economic development’ (Bell 2008: 3). Although the party could temporarily rely on this justification, there is still a great need for the party to seek a more convincing political ideology – to continue to justify its rule. A major part of this is a complete makeover of the expressed ideology of the party to continue to stay relevant to the changing social and economic conditions.
It is evident that the CCP’s leadership has already realised the role that ideology plays. More significant, it is evident that the CCP’s leadership has been seeking a political ideology to fill the void left by Marxist-Maoism. For example, in a Politburo session in late 2004, Hu Jintao called for a balance between ‘sticking to the socialist road with Chinese characteristics’ on the one hand and ‘thought liberation and keen innovation’ on the other. Hu urged cadres to ‘search ceaselessly for new ideas, new approaches and new methods to solve problems’ (Lam 2004: 38– 39). In a report on the work of the central government delivered at the first session of the Eleventh National People’s Congress on 5 March 2008, Premier Wen Jiabao emphasised the significance of the reform of the cultural system and the development of Chinese culture. In order to achieve this, Wen (2008) said: ‘We should let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend. We should also develop the studies of philosophy and social sciences’.
With the decline of Marxist-Maoism, the CCP leadership needs to legitimise a capitalist economy under the rule of a historically socialist party. China’s cultural tradition has been framed as a convenient tool that allows the party-state to achieve this legitimisation. This could be ascribed to several features of tradition. First, tradition contributes to the justification of a state’s existence and its rule over its population. Schochet argues that laws and policies are often justified by appeals to what was done in the past (Schochet 2004). Second, tradition can provide integrative symbols, memories and associations, which can be very useful in restoring political order at critical moments. Pocock has pointed out that if a state that is in trouble can link itself to powerful political traditions which, allegedly, have already existed, the state will be able to ground itself in legitimised concepts (Pocock 1971). Third, tradition generates a feeling of belonging for the people of a state, which further contributes to the continuation of the state. Tradition can teach and remind people within a nation that what they have in common is greater and more important than their differences. This way, tradition creates and sustains a shared popular will. Halbwachs has pointed out that the collective memory generated by tradition enhances feelings of rootedness and security for the people within a nation (Coser 1992).
Since the 1978 economic reforms, the Chinese political elite have started to exploit cultural heritage. More importantly, they have gradually come to understand the role of China’s tradition in solving the ‘crisis of faith’ by the Chinese population and legitimising the CCP’s power. For example, in a talk in 1997 on how to train honourable and skilled government officials, then- president Jiang Zemin pointed out that ‘today’s China is the result of the evolution of China’s tradition (…) A nation, which loses its own history and tradition, cannot have a profound understanding of its present or create the future’ (Li 1999: 9). Li Ruihuan, Chairperson of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (1998–2003), in a meeting with the Japanese Mikado in 1999, said:
China has a rich and generous traditional legacy. We are proud of it, and we also feel responsible for it. If we deal with it properly, it will cultivate our national spirit; if we deal with it improperly, it will hinder the progress of our nation. In terms of this issue, we made some mistakes.
(Wen and Yu 1999: 1)
More recently, President Hu Jintao, in his 2007 report to the Seventeenth National Congress of the CCP, said: ‘China’s tradition has been an unfailing driving force for the Chinese nation to keep its unity and progress from generation to generation’ (Hu 2007).
The Resistance Against External Expansion
The resistance to conquest by foreign ideology and culture is another common reason for the search of traditions within a state. Indeed, since the late twentieth century, the political use of tradition has become popular in late-developing countries and previously colonial countries alike. One example of the state introducing a native tradition is the model of ‘late’ industrialisation, authoritarian rule and anti-Western ideologies diffused from Japan to South East Asia and present in mainland China.
As in the Chinese case, since the economic reforms, the Chinese party-state has shown an official interest in using China’s cultural tradition to resist the influence of Western ideologies and cultures. The international use of China’s cultural traditions is mainly manifested in the promotion of the Chinese ‘cultural soft power’. The concept of soft power can be traced back to the works of Hans J. Morgenthau, Klaus Knorr and Ray Cline (Morgenthau 1948). As summarised by Joseph Nye, ‘soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion’ (Nye 2004: 10). According to Nye, the soft power of a country rests primarily on three roots: its culture (in places where it is attractive to others); its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad); and its foreign policy (when its policy is seen as legitimate and having moral authority) (Nye 2002).
Notably, the Chinese understanding and explanation of soft power theory is different from that in the West. For Chinese specialists in international politics, China’s soft power is deemed more like a weapon to counter or exclude Western influence than a tool to attract Western followers. Professor Wang Huning was one of the first Chinese scholars to pay attention to the concept of soft power. Wang was a key political advisor to former President Jiang Zemin and President Hu Jintao, then director of the policy research office of the CCP Central Committee and now the secretariat of the CCP’s central committee. Wang criticised the West’s use of soft power as a newly-invented strategy to manipulate China, saying that ‘the Western countries have stepped up their efforts to control or influence international affairs and the development of developing countries by using cultural forces’ (Wang 1994: 9–10). Instead of getting other countries to change by using carrots and sticks, he said, they are switching to softer methods of exercising power, namely, getting others to want what they want. China, he warned, must not jump on the bandwagon but respond to the West’s new cultural stratagem to achieve political hegemony by ‘maintaining China’s own position and orientation’ (Wang 1994: 10).
From the perspective of mainstream scholars, China’s soft power is the attractiveness of its cultural tradition, which excludes China’s political values and its foreign policies (Nye 2002). For example, in his essay entitled Cultural Expansion and Cultural Sovereignty, Wang Huning argued that ‘cultural tradition is the root of soft power’ in China (Wang 1994: 9). Interpreting the words of Joseph Nye, Wei Ming explained ‘soft power’ as resting on the ‘attractiveness of culture’, but he did not mention the other recourses of soft power (Wei 2007: 25). In addition, according to Tong Shijun, a scholar based at Shanghai’s Academy of Social Sciences, ‘cultural tradition as soft power is more fundamental and essential than political values and foreign policies’, thus ‘we should enhance China’s cultural soft power’ (Tong 2008: 1).
It seems that the Chinese leadership has acknowledged that Chinese political ideologies and policies lack attractiveness on the global stage and are mired in long-standing cold war ideas about the nature of communist China and caught up in issues of human rights. In Hu Jintao’s report to the Seventeenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Hu called for the party to ‘build up the system of socialist core values and make the socialist ideology more attractive and cohesive’. When a Chinese leader is so eager to make the socialist ideology more attractive and cohesive, it indicates that the party is well aware that the socialist ideology has already lost its attractiveness and cohesion. In order to save the less-attractive and less-influential ideology, Hu called for more active ways to push forward the development and prosperity of socialist culture (Hu 2007).
More significantly, Hu’s regime turned to China’s cultural tradition to gain and maintain China’s cultural soft power. Since the late 1990s, the CCP leadership has made a great number of references to China’s cultural tradition and its role in promoting Chinese cultural soft power. For instance, in a national meeting with representatives of artists and writers in 2006, President Hu Jintao said: ‘it is an essential and practical project for us to understand the direction of our cultural development, to create a resplendent national culture, to enhance the international competitiveness of national culture, and to promote national soft power’ (Li and Zhang 2006: 1). More recently, the leadership’s emphasis on cultural attractiveness as the foundation of China’s soft power is further underscored by the Report to the Seventeenth National Congress of the CCP in October 2007. In this report, President Hu Jintao called for the party to ‘bring about a new upsurge in socialist cultural development, stimulating the cultural creativity of the whole nation, and enhancing the cultural soft power of China’ (Hu 2007).
The lack of reference to the other two roots of soft power is quite understandable. This is because China’s official political value, Marxism and Chinese foreign policies, have little that is attractive to the wider world. The results of a six-nation public opinion survey on the current and potential use of soft power in East Asia showed that many respondents respected China’s cultural tradition but found the influence of China’s politics or popular culture less attractive (Whitney and Shambaugh 2008). Additionally, even Chinese scholars lacked confidence when it came to the attractiveness of China’s official political values and its foreign polices. For example, Zhang Jianjing, a columnist and vice-chief editor of China Economic Times, argued that the ‘Beijing Consensus’ was one source of China’s soft power. However, Zhang himself was not confident of the attractiveness of the Beijing Consensus, pointing out that the consensus was not attractive to the West and to the rest of the world, especially democratic countries such as India and US-influenced Latin American countries (Zhang 2004). That the ‘Beijing Consensus’ would be unattractive was already predicted by Nye. According to Nye, states most likely to project soft power in an information age were those whose dominant ideas were closer to global norms, which are currently liberalist and pluralist (Nye 2004).
Conclusion
China’s ‘cultural tradition’ in a broad and vague sense has been used by the CCP since the 1990s. This new emphasis on China’s cultural tradition by the party-state may appear odd, especially given the harsh critique of Confucianism by the party during the Cultural Revolution in 1966–76. The 1990s witnessed a reassessment of Confucianism by the CCP. The party’s support for Confucianism faded away and was replaced by the new emphasis on the broader term, namely, China’s cultural tradition.
Official party narratives about China’s cultural tradition have focused instead on the ‘refined’ beliefs, customs and values that manifest in Chinese history. This is juxtaposed by the careful cultivation of heritage sites as part of a major effort to reposition Chinese cultural politics for both domestic and international audiences. As I have shown, within China, this has been part of a major undertaking to fill in the ideology vacuum left by the death of Marxism. Such efforts have been aimed at shifting the emphasis towards a more nationalistic view of China; one which seeks to appropriate selected elements of Chinese cultural heritage for the good of the party (see Wang’s discussion of Red Tourism and Long’s discussion of socialist heritage in this volume). Additionally, the selective use of cultural heritage is part of a project of managing internal population diversity, as well as a useful tool for developing tourism and heritage centred economies.
The increasing emphasis of cultural tradition is also part of the cultural diplomacy and posturing internationally. As was clearly on display during the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games, there has been a concerted effort to showcase the diversity of Chinese culture under the carefully constructed platform of national unity. Displays of cultural tradition are being used as part of China’s soft power, in large part because China’s political values and foreign policy lack attractiveness on a global scale. Cultural heritage has become one of the main vehicles through which the CCP is marketing and promoting itself both domestically and internationally, seeking to anchor itself onto the legitimacy of thousands of years of history, while both conveniently bringing the rich diversity of cultural heritage under the umbrella of ‘Chinese’ and white-washing the stain of the Cultural Revolution.
Notes
1 The document is included in Department of Policy Regulations, Ministry of Education, People’s Republic of China, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo xianxing jiaoyu fagui huibian (中华人民共和国现行教育 法规汇编 The Collection of Educational Politics of the People’s Republic of China), 33, item 28.
2 The text of the document is available online at http://news.xinhuanet.com/video/2004–11/29/content_2273313.html
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