China: Making the Marxist Grade

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.

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.