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Self-Examining. The highlight is the Tuesday lecture given by Ai Szu-chi. Sometimes he is there in person; at other times he is heard on records. These lectures, the only ones given at the university, last as a rule from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. The gist of Ai's "philosophy" is contained in a book of his called Historical Materialism, which has become the virtual Bible of hsueh hsi. (Sample excerpts: "Communism is the exquisite acme of man's social evolution . . . The capitalistic world is being pushed into the grave step by step . . .")
After the lectures come group discussions. Students are encouraged to tell all about their backgrounds and their social and political ideas, describe their grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters and friends. A Communist party observer takes notes on everything said.
After about five months of hsueh hsi, a group is called to a "thought mobilization" meeting at which all are urged, one after another, to get up and "cast aside, once & for all, their burdensome thoughts." There are warnings that those who still hold reactionary thoughts or have not yet confessed reactionary deeds will sooner or later regret it. What follows is a kind of political revivalist meeting, or a Buchmanite confessional, at which students cry their ideological sins and profess to see the light of reform.
The final and most important step is the writing of a sort of graduation thesis which the Communists call a "thought compendium." It can run up to 50,000 words in exhaustive self-analysis of the student's thoughts from birth to his "conversion." The thought compendium undergoes the scrutiny of the group leader and the party observer.
Most of the thought compendiums are returned to the students four and five times for rewriting. No specific reason is given—just that the thesis is "incomplete" or "failed to cover all essential points." Back the student goes to think up worse sins he has committed. "By this time the average student would be so tired from the incessant discussions and so fed up with the dull life that he was willing to confess anything," says the escaped student. "There is no way out. If we failed to write an acceptable thesis, we would only get more indoctrination."
Once his thought compendium is accepted, the graduate is assigned a job, perhaps with a land reform team, or in Korea, or at a bureaucratic desk. He has no choice of jobs. And along with him, wherever he goes, goes his dossier, always there to be used against him.