~ Linn Maung ~
A Chinese high school’s reported requirement that students watch the state broadcaster’s flagship evening news programme every day has triggered an online backlash, highlighting growing concerns over how political messaging is being embedded in the routine of education.
Screenshots circulating on Chinese social media show a tightly structured timetable in which senior high school students begin their day at 6:20 a.m., attend nine classes, and remain at school until lights-out at 11 p.m. At 7 p.m., students are required to spend 30 minutes watching the state broadcaster’s evening news, before beginning two 70-minute evening study sessions.
The controversy is less about 30 minutes of television than about what students are being required to watch, and why. Critics argue that making the Communist Party’s principal state-media news programme a compulsory part of the school day turns political messaging into a routine educational activity, leaving little room for competing sources of information.
The timetable has drawn ridicule online, with some Chinese users comparing the highly regimented schedule to prison routines. Others have questioned the wisdom of exposing students to what they describe as state propaganda under the guise of news.
The reaction also points to a broader concern: political conditioning in China does not necessarily stop at the classroom door. Social media users have described daily flag-raising ceremonies, compulsory singing of the national anthem and textbooks that prominently promote the Communist Party.
The messaging begins even earlier. One resident said his four-year-old son had recently begun singing so-called “red songs”, revolutionary songs associated with communist ideology, after being taught them by kindergarten teachers.
“Isn’t this indoctrinating children from an early age?” the resident asked, questioning how effective decades of political education have been in producing genuine belief in the Party.
From Political Education to Information Control
An academic familiar with the issue said the more significant question was whether students had meaningful access to information beyond state-controlled media.
“The official news broadcast is not an ordinary news programme, but the main platform for the Chinese Communist Party to release political propaganda and promote its leaders,” the academic said.
Making such a programme part of the daily school timetable, he argued, effectively gives students a fixed dose of officially sanctioned information at a prescribed time, rather than encouraging them to compare different sources and develop independent judgments.
The distinction matters because the programme is not simply a source of news. In China’s tightly controlled media environment, state television serves as a principal vehicle for conveying the Party’s political priorities, official narratives, and leadership activities.
The reported school schedule therefore illustrates a broader model of political education in which exposure to information itself becomes part of the curriculum.
“So many parents want to send their children abroad precisely because they don’t want their children to be brainwashed by this kind of education,” the academic said.
Indoctrination as a Continuum
Experts argued that the development should be seen as part of a much broader system of political education rather than as an isolated school policy.
Under the CCP, political messaging is introduced early and reinforced through successive stages of education, from kindergarten and patriotic activities to school textbooks and state media. The concept of “love for the Party and love for the country” is often presented as part of a single patriotic framework, blurring the distinction between national identity and political loyalty.
The reported mandatory viewing of evening news represents an extension of that model into students’ daily routines. What might ordinarily be a family’s choice to watch television becomes a scheduled institutional activity.
Critics say this transforms political messaging from something students encounter in textbooks into something they repeatedly consume as part of their everyday lives.
The deeper concern, therefore, is not whether Chinese students spend 30 minutes watching television. It is whether an education system can encourage independent thinking when the state also controls a significant share of the information environment surrounding students.
The controversy offers a glimpse into the CCP’s broader approach to political education: shape the classroom, shape the curriculum and increasingly, shape the information students encounter outside it.
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