Political Education

Over the past 30 years, James Z Lee (Li Zhongqing), Chair Professor of History and Sociology at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has studied the family backgrounds of 64,500 college students who enrolled at Peking University between 1952 and 1999. He found that shortly after the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, Peking University admitted a growing number of students from poor families in rural areas. Since the 1970s, higher education at Peking University was highly sought after by students from families of government officials at a time when college admissions were largely based on internal recommendations. Since the 1980s, however, more than half the university’s students have been the children of intellectuals, and the number of students from families of workers and farmers has decreased ever since. The research shows China’s modern higher education system has been inextricably interwoven with the politics of the day.