Yunnan professor keeps political courses lively

Ideological and political courses in college shall teach students to embrace different world views and values while helping them "absorb their essence and discard their dross", an associate professor at Yunnan University said.

"Globalization has brought competing values and cultures closer to one another," said Ma Zhixia, who has been teaching ideology and politics in Southwest China since 2017.

Chinese advocates a "culture of harmony" and that has prompted her to ask students to be respectful and tolerant to values of other nations, the 32-year-old member of the Communist Party of China said.

Over the past few years, one thing that impressed her was her students are getting increasingly younger, a demographic shift that has led her to adopt a more "novel and chic" teaching methodology, Ma said at a news conference in Beijing.

Ma said she has organized events for reading Marxist classics and shooting micro-films, as part of an attempt to lead students to perceive history through the lens of "dialectical materialism", the Marxist theory that political and historical events result from the conflict of social forces.