Page "Education in the People's Republic of China" Paragraph 20

The new Communist government created wide access to some form of education for all, except children of people under suspicion for " landlordism " and other bourgeois crimes.

The possibility however of re-education and service to the " masses " was held out to bourgeois families as long as they proved their good faith by service to the workers and peasants.

This meant that even before the Cultural Revolution, there was a continuum, in China, between the prison, the re-education camp, and the school, a continuum which also exists in the West.

Formally speaking, the opportunity was extended to all classes to join China's project on its Leninist terms.