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Former Chinese Teachers Explain How the CCP Has Politicised Education for Control

‘While it’s mandatory for first-year high school students, the brainwashing goes far beyond the classroom,’ said one teacher.
Former Chinese Teachers Explain How the CCP Has Politicised Education for Control
Students salute as a national flag is raised during a ceremony on the first day of the new school year at an elementary school in Beijing, China, on Sept. 1, 2021. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Sophia Lam
Sophia Lam
7/3/2025|Updated: 7/3/2025
0:00
While China’s education minister boasts the country’s basic education now rivals that of high-income nations, a former high school teacher says otherwise—calling out the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for embedding political indoctrination deep into classrooms and beyond.

Wang Mengmeng, who taught the Chinese language and served as a homeroom teacher for over three years at a top public high school in eastern Anhui Province, says both students and teachers are “victims” of the CCP’s ideological control.

China’s education system, she said, is designed to monitor and manipulate thought. Party branches, political instructors, and homeroom teachers all play a role in ensuring student loyalty to the CCP above all else.

As a homeroom teacher, Wang had to attend weekly meetings where school officials drilled Party loyalty into staff. Her role was to force that message on the students.

“Ideological and political education isn’t just a course—it’s a tool for infiltration, brainwashing, and persecution,” she said. “We were made to indoctrinate the students—to make them believe in the importance of the Communist Party, to believe in the state, to believe in the Party.”

Wang developed severe depression and somatization—a condition where emotional stress shows up as physical symptoms like fatigue, pain, or numbness—due to the relentless psychological pressure. She eventually quit and left China in 2023.

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She pointed to the so-called “ideological and political education” course as the CCP’s main tool to impose its ideology on both teachers and students.

“The CCP’s ideological and political curriculum is all-pervasive,” Wang told the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times in a recent interview. “While it’s mandatory for first-year high school students, the brainwashing goes far beyond the classroom—it’s constant and relentless.”

After arriving in the United States, Wang experienced American education firsthand and was struck by the emphasis on independent thinking and individuality. A real education, she said, teaches students how to be human—not how to serve the Party.

‘Victims’ of Communist Indoctrination

One method of indoctrination was through making the students write assignments. They were taught to follow a rigid, formulaic structure in their essays. The final paragraph, Wang said, had to say something like: “As youth of the new era, we must follow the leadership of the Communist Party and study Xi Jinping’s Thought.”

This format was non-negotiable—it aligned with grading standards for China’s national college entrance exam.

Wang described the ideological control as all-encompassing. Students attended classes six days a week, and political content was woven into every subject. Despite knowing the truth about the CCP’s abuses, she was forced to praise the regime in front of her students and promote hostility toward the United States and Japan.

“You have to tell them, ‘Without the Communist Party, there would be no New China.’”

In the CCP’s brainwashing rhetoric, China, for thousands of years before communism, was an “old society,” which was “backward” and “corrupt.” It dubs China after 1949 as a “new” China, in which “Chinese people have since stood up.”

The internal conflict led to Wang’s breakdown. “I was saying things that went against my conscience but I had no choice. The students had to pass their exams. Whatever I taught had such [brainwashing] content.”

Eventually, the mental and moral toll became too much. Wang left China because she could no longer tolerate the system’s pressure and deceit.

CCP Rule Built on ‘Lies and Violence’: Former Chinese Professor

Li Yuanhua, a former professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing and now a resident of Australia, said the CCP relies on “lies and violence” to prop up its rule.

“If the Chinese people clearly understood the Party’s illegitimate rise to power, its betrayal of the nation, and its history of killing its own people, no one would trust it,” Li told The Epoch Times in a recent interview.

The Ministry of Education, China’s top indoctrination watchdog, has encouraged this ideological expansion, he said. In 2022, it joined nine other ministries to promote the so-called “Big Ideological and Political Course,” a campaign to embed Party doctrine into various aspects of life—not just textbooks.
He noted that the indoctrination goes well beyond schools—it extends into tourism and the arts.

‘Red Tourism’ and Propaganda Through Art

Red tourism promotes visits to historic CCP sites, like Mao Zedong’s hometown in Hunan Province or the city of Yan’an, once a Red Army base, in China’s western Shaanxi Province. These trips are designed to glorify the Party’s past and are heavily promoted by China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
Art is another major propaganda tool. On Dec. 7, 2024, Central China Normal University organized a mass performance titled “The Party’s History in Song,” featuring over 2,600 students and children from affiliated schools. Performers danced while they were dressed in Red Army uniforms and sang “red songs”—songs promoted by the CCP that glorify the party, its leaders (especially Mao Zedong), communism, and socialist ideals.
“Students performed choral renditions of ‘We Are the Successors to Communism’ and ‘Red Star Song,’ allowing the audience to experience the power of belief through the purity of sound,” read a post on the university’s official social media. The deputy party secretary of the Provincial Youth League of Hubei Province and the deputy party secretary of the university both attended the event to show their support.

CCP ‘Exporting Communist Ideology Abroad’

Li also warned that the CCP is pushing its ideology overseas, particularly through Confucius Institutes (CIs)—state-run language and culture programs that are part of the CCP’s United Front Work, operating in foreign universities.

“The CIs offer small incentives like free textbooks and funding, but they limit academic freedom,” Li said.

The CIs forbid discussion on sensitive topics such as democracy, China’s military rise, issues in Tibet, the spiritual group Falun Gong, ethnic Uyghurs, Taiwan’s contesting claims as the government of China, the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and the Hong Kong National Security Law, according to Chen Yonglin, a former Chinese diplomat who defected to Australia in 2005.
The CCP also uses sponsored exchange programs to shape international opinion. In November 2023, during the APEC Summit in the United States, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced that China would invite 50,000 American youth to study in China over five years.
The CCP’s efforts to influence young people from Western countries appear to be bearing fruit. On Bilibili—often referred to as China’s YouTube—numerous videos show foreign nationals enthusiastically singing “red songs,” the revolutionary anthems of the Communist Party.
In March, VOA reported that China had facilitated a staged presentation of the country for many American students visiting on such trips. Organizers reportedly dodged student questions about topics like the world premier classical Chinese dance company Shen Yun Performing Arts, which is banned in China.

“When the CCP invites 50,000 American students to China, everything they’re shown is staged,” Li said. “The real aim is to influence the future elite of American society. It’s just another propaganda and brainwashing campaign—this time targeting the West’s next generation.”

Li Siqi, Chang Chun, and Caden Pearson contributed to this report.
Sophia Lam
Sophia Lam
Author
Sophia Lam joined The Epoch Times in 2021 and covers China-related topics.
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