POLITICAL TEXTS IN CHINESE UNIVERSITIES BEFORE AND AFTER TIANANMEN

This essay considers political textbooks in Chinese universities before and after Tiananmen from the perspective of the search for cultural meaning. The first part discusses Habermas' concept of cultural rationalization and attempts to apply this to an overview of Chinese development since 1949. Part two examines the changes taking place in political education from the mid-eighties, with a special focus on the content and ideas of the new textbooks that were developed. These are interpreted as part of a process of cultural rationalization, which was brought to an abrupt halt as a result of June 4. Part three of the paper examines the attempts made to reformulate political education in the aftermath of June 4 in ways that restored fixed authoritarian categories of meaning and prevented further cultural rationalization. The paper concludes that these attempts to counter ''all-out Westernization'' are actually likely to produce distortions in China's modernization that have parallels with Habermas' depiction of the Western experience.