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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.