A new children’s film about Zhou Enlai reveals a lot about China today

COUNTRIES HAVE to make revealing choices as they craft patriotic messages for children. To put it kindly, young minds are tiny treasure-houses that deserve to be stocked with only a nation’s most precious beliefs. To be more blunt, small children are easily distracted, so are best taught only a few important things.

It is therefore worth studying what China’s propaganda chiefs have in store for youngsters this summer. As usual, June 1st was marked this year in China as International Children’s Day, a festival of visits to museums, school picnics and wholesome games. A month later there will be a much larger event: celebrations on July 1st of the 100th anniversary of the party’s founding in 1921.

China’s leader, President Xi Jinping, is presented to the young as “Xi Dada”, or “Uncle Xi”, an austere but caring patriarch. Mr Xi stresses the importance of loyalty, which is why children’s choirs are busy performing such songs as “Me and My Country” and “Follow the Leadership of the Communist Party of China”. Party history is being used to inspire the masses. That explains reports of kindergarten pupils being dressed up in miniature combat fatigues and told to crawl on their bellies while clutching straw-wrapped “rations”, to re-enact Red Army supply runs. There is much talk of China entering a “new era” of prosperity,...