University officials vows to promote socialist core values

BEIJING -- Senior officials from several prestigious Chinese universities have pledged to promote core socialist values on campus but said there should be no political indoctrination.

"The value of a nation is like its spirit, and if we do not have our own values, we may get lost in a cultural nihility," Han Zhen, head of the Communist Party of China (CPC) committee of the Beijing Foreign Studies University, told Xinhua.

Eagerness to learn from the experience of western countries during the initial years of China's reform and opening-up drive and the increasingly diverse and complicated interests in modern China are reasons underlying the current susceptibility to some western values among China's young students, Han said.

"Universities should not only teach intelligent knowledge," said Zhu Jian, deputy head of the Party committee of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. "What is more important, universities should foster the students' spiritual maturity."

"If they are not introduced to correct values, they may be easily exposed to other ideas," Zhu said.

Wu Qiantao, a professor with the School of Marxism of the Tsinghua University, said that to foster and implement the socialist core values should be a basic principle in the moral education in China's universities.

However, the officials also noted that work to promote such values should not turn into a political indoctrination.

"We should remember our responsibility to promote the socialist core values and keep our political integrity. However, we should not be homiletic to the students to inoculate them with ideas they do not have interests in," Zhu said.

"Education of socialist values should be conducted on an equal footing. It is a process of both mutual education and self education," Han said.