The Patriotic Education Campaign () was a cultural campaign in China initiated in 1991 but not carried out in full scale until 1994. In May 1995, the Chinese government issued the "Notice on Recommending Hundreds of Patriotic Education Books to Primary and Middle Schools across the Country", and made a list of a hundred patriotic films, a hundred patriotic songs, a hundred patriotic books. The main goal of the campaign was to "boost the nation’s spirit, enhance cohesion, and foster national self esteem and pride".
This was done through education that was designed to construct a historical memory of what the People's Republic of China (PRC) was created from, by emphasising the role the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in securing national independence, and the influence of foreign countries on China. This aim was to boost the CCP's legitimacy, which during the 1980s had declined, particularly around the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The academic Suisheng Zhao has said the Campaign is part of a strategy to make the Party the “paramount patriotic force and guardian of national pride.”
Ideology
Guiding ideology
According to the 1994 "Outline", patriotism education focuses on young people and takes socialism with Chinese characteristics and the party's basic line as the guide. The main content covers the history of China, the traditional culture of China, and the beliefs of the CCP. The outline also promotes Chinese nationalism. In 2019 the "Outline for the Implementation of Patriotic Education in the New Era" was implemented which contains expositions by CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping, and tenets of Xi Jinping Thought such as the Chinese dream.
Background
In the post-Cold War era the Chinese Communist Party promoted a policy of Chinese Nationalism. This form of nationalism had a long history of political utilisation in China, first appearing during the Qing dynasty when China suffered a humiliating defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War and growing over the course of the 20th century as China faced various military conquests at the hands of various colonial powers, Western and Japanese.
Following the Communist Party's 1949 victory in the Chinese Civil War, CCP Chairman Mao Zedong employed Chinese nationalism as a political tool used to bolster Chinese patriotism and party loyalty; seeking to closely align Chinese national identity with a sense of fidelity to the Communist Party. During the Cold War, Chinese Nationalism was promoted as a uniting national philosophy in Chinese cultural and educational institutions and was used to justify the Party's suppression of separatist and secessionist movements in Western provinces.
In the 1980s a growing pro-democracy movement emerged in China, culminating in the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests. The Chinese Communist Party, feeling increasingly threatened by the movement and the increasingly drastic lengths to which protesters would go in order to advocate political reform, sought to institute the Patriotic Education Campaign to combat the rising wave of anti-Party sentiment associated with the movement. The PEC constituted a modern iteration of the Chinese Nationalist vision and was designed to foster increased party loyalty among a generation of young Chinese students born under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping and therefore too young to remember the Communist Party, and China, of Mao Zedong.
The Chinese Nationalist-bent of the PEC was not immediately guaranteed in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Protests however. While consensus existed within the Party regarding the need for a more targeted political education of the younger generation in order to foster increased support for the CPP, two party factions, the conservatives and the reformists, emerged with competing ideological visions of the legitimisation strategy that should be employed in youth political education. Both factions agreed that Marxism–Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought no longer served to sufficiently legitimise CCP rule, yet while the conservative faction argued for a strengthening of the position of Maoist ideology in political education, the reformist faction, led by Deng Xiaoping, saw Chinese Nationalism as the solution.
Ultimately, the Patriotic Education Campaign was one of the Communist Party's key initiatives emerging from the 1990 National Morality Conference. The Conference and Campaign both reflected a view that failures of moral education had allowed the emergence of the Student Movement which had culminated in the Tiananmen protests. As such, the party endorsed a plan to reinvigorate educational moralising in order to prevent further subversive youth movements.