CHINA: Brain Washing

China’s Red masters have a special word for thought control: hsueh hsi, or “the practice of learning.” China’s plain people use a more telling expression: Communist indoctrination, which presses on them without pause or pity, is simply hsi nao, or “washing the brain.” From Hong Kong last week, TIME Correspondent Robert Neville cabled a survey of brain washing in Red China:

Correct Thinking. “Incorrect” thoughts in Red China may be punished by anything up to death. “Correct” thoughts can often be the sure path to success. This probably explains why millions of mainland Chinese are engaged in hsueh hsi and why Red China has a dedicated army which rarely breaks, an efficient and incorruptible corps of administrators, and a zealous youth ready to believe that black is white and to die for that warped belief.

So important is hsueh hsi that it takes precedence over almost every other activity in Red China. Writers, actors, entertainers, journalists are not allowed to work without having passed their hsueh hsi. All army personnel, government employees and trade unionists, as well as Communist party workers, must attend indoctrination lectures. To conduct hsueh hsi courses on a national scale requires thousands of lecturers, teachers, observers, spotters and heretic hunters.

The chief brain washer of Red China is Ai Szu-chi, director of the all-important Federation of Democratic Youth. More heard than seen, Ai gives long-winded, ponderous lectures over Radio Peking. A native of Yunnan and a comrade of long standing, he edits a turgidly written monthly called, appropriately, Hsueh Hsi, in which he answers tricky questions concerning correct Marxist conduct. Ai really shines, however, in the six so-called “revolutionary universities” where young Chinese twigs are first bent.

Drab Living. The six revolutionary universities are at Peking, Nanking, Sian, Canton, Hankow and Kweiyang. Foremost among them is the North China Revolutionary University, located in an army barracks in Peking’s western suburb. Last week I talked to a recent graduate who had just made his escape into Hong Kong.

The university, he reports, has an enrollment of 8,500 men & women, who are divided into four categories: 1) returned students from abroad, and children from overseas Chinese families; 2) former civil servants and teachers of the old Nationalist regime, who might be useful provided their thoughts are “adjusted” to the new way of thinking; 3) Communists who are in need of reindoctrination; and 4) picked, promising teenagers.

Most pupils need at least a year’s brain washing. Once enrolled, there is no getting out. If the student is a stubborn case, there is a process called indoctrination through labor, which means he is put to work in a gang, on repairing Peking’s city walls or digging sewers. Food is rationed at 20 ounces of kaoliang (millet) and one ounce of peanut oil a day, topped with occasional boiled potatoes and cabbage and about two ounces of meat a week. Students follow a 5:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. routine, broken only by two half-hour rest periods.

Self-Examining. The highlight is the Tuesday lecture given by Ai Szu-chi. Sometimes he is there in person; at other times he is heard on records. These lectures, the only ones given at the university, last as a rule from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. The gist of Ai’s “philosophy” is contained in a book of his called Historical Materialism, which has become the virtual Bible of hsueh hsi. (Sample excerpts: “Communism is the exquisite acme of man’s social evolution . . . The capitalistic world is being pushed into the grave step by step . . .”)

After the lectures come group discussions. Students are encouraged to tell all about their backgrounds and their social and political ideas, describe their grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters and friends. A Communist party observer takes notes on everything said.

After about five months of hsueh hsi, a group is called to a “thought mobilization” meeting at which all are urged, one after another, to get up and “cast aside, once & for all, their burdensome thoughts.” There are warnings that those who still hold reactionary thoughts or have not yet confessed reactionary deeds will sooner or later regret it. What follows is a kind of political revivalist meeting, or a Buchmanite confessional, at which students cry their ideological sins and profess to see the light of reform.

The final and most important step is the writing of a sort of graduation thesis which the Communists call a “thought compendium.” It can run up to 50,000 words in exhaustive self-analysis of the student’s thoughts from birth to his “conversion.” The thought compendium undergoes the scrutiny of the group leader and the party observer.

Most of the thought compendiums are returned to the students four and five times for rewriting. No specific reason is given—just that the thesis is “incomplete” or “failed to cover all essential points.” Back the student goes to think up worse sins he has committed. “By this time the average student would be so tired from the incessant discussions and so fed up with the dull life that he was willing to confess anything,” says the escaped student. “There is no way out. If we failed to write an acceptable thesis, we would only get more indoctrination.”

Once his thought compendium is accepted, the graduate is assigned a job, perhaps with a land reform team, or in Korea, or at a bureaucratic desk. He has no choice of jobs. And along with him, wherever he goes, goes his dossier, always there to be used against him.