Page 79 - Education World November 2022

else,” says Dr. Newton Cain. “They get all the professional schools that the party uses to transmit skills and ideology
support and ancillary jobs, and businesses in Fiji do well to bureaucrats.
out of students.” In the run-up to the 20th Congress that concluded on
The resentment had been exacerbated by a perception October 22, several provinces reported that lessons were
that Fiji had monopolised USP’s capital spending while dispensed in these schools to congress delegates who have
campuses elsewhere had been left to wither. Fiji has rubbed no official titles (model workers, farmers and the like). The
salt in the wounds by denying its citizens eligibility for TELS classes focus on the need for loyalty to the party’s leader,
loans if they study at USP’s overseas campuses, a move that Xi Jinping, and on instilling the principle that “whatever
undermined enrolments in Vanuatu — home to the univer- the party asks me to do, I will do”, as one account put it.
sity’s law school — and the Samoa campus, which special- Typically, the training lasts two days.
ises in agriculture. Normally, however, the students are officials. In a recent
With the dominant member state now refusing to pay its paper, David Shambaugh of George Washington University
way, the university faces a particularly tough 2022. It plans wrote that nearly all of China’s roughly 50 million official
to seek additional contributions from its major donors and functionaries, from Central government ministers down to
to find “new development assistance partners”, according township chiefs, have passed through the training system,
to its annual plan. usually for mid-career stints ranging from one week to two
years. Shambaugh describes the system, comprising about
CHINA 7,000 institutions, as a “critical cog in the machinery” of
CPC control schools party control. Subjects taught range from Marxist theory to
the nitty-gritty of public administration. Some even grant
COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA (CPC) congress- degrees, including MBAs.
es are rubber-stamp affairs. The 2,300 delegates The most prominent are known as party schools. Before
of the 20th Congress that recently concluded in Xi Ping came to power, these schools sometimes encour-
Beijing, had no chance of scuppering the decisions — al- aged innovative thinking. Students talked about how to
ready made in secret — that were unveiled at the event. make the party more democratic with freer elections for its
Most of them had undergone training in a vast system of leaders. Schools often invited foreign scholars to lecture,

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