China’s About-Face on Education
Earlier in January, China’s National Textbook Committee asked schools for scrutiny of all Constitution-related textbooks in use, according to a notice published on January 7 on the website of Jiangxi Provincial Education Bureau. That notice, which had been removed from the internet by February, is still cached here.
And as Zhang’s book vanished, one clear winner emerged in the arena of constitutional law that illustrates what is at stake for legal education in China. Several colleges, including Jiangsu Normal University, demanded teachers use instead a textbook called Constitutional Law (宪法学), published in 2011 as part of the “Marxism Theory Studies and Construction Project” (马克思主义理论研究和建设工程), an initiative launched back in 2004 — the same year Zhang’s book was first published — by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party during the tenure of Xi Jinping’s predecessor, Hu Jintao (胡锦涛). The ostensible goal of the project was the “prosperous development of philosophy and social sciences” (繁荣发展哲学社会科学) in China through the application of Marxism.
The results — for the field of constitutional law at any rate — were not exactly inspiring. A search for Constitutional Law on China’s most popular and trafficked book-rating website, Douban, shows the book earning a lackluster rating of 2.5 out of a possible score of 10, while various editions of Zhang Qianfan’s Introduction to Constitutional Law uniformly receive ratings of between 9.1 to 9.8.
