Young People Who Tell the History of the Party (Youth Faction, Youth Striving for a New Era (35))

Source: People's Daily - People's Daily

Figure (1): Li Shao is conducting a teaching demonstration.

Profile picture

Figure (2): Zhai Tianlin (middle) demonstrates tearing paper to students of Zilang First Primary School in Nantong City.

Figure (3): Lu Jia at work.

Photo by Shi Fang, a reporter of this newspaper

Picture (4): Wang Yali (second from left) explains party history to children.

In the party history study and education activities, some young people have enriched the content of the narrative and innovated methods and methods, so that the party history study and education can enter people's lives in a novel and flexible way, and have resonated with countless audiences, especially young audiences.

The party's cause needs to be passed on by the younger generation, so how to guide young people to deeply read the "textbook" of party history, ignite the enthusiasm of young people in studying party history, and tell the story of party history well? Let's take a look at how these young people have innovated ways and methods to tell the history of the Party.

Lu Jia, Central Academy of Party History and Literature:

Let the history of the Party "come alive"

In a simple office of the Central Institute of Party History and Documentation (hereinafter referred to as the "Institute"), Lu Jia, deputy director of the website editorial department of the Seventh Research Department, was rushing to write a manuscript, sometimes tapping the keyboard quickly, sometimes flipping through a large stack of materials on the table.

What made "post-80s" Lu Jia devote himself to it was the column "Centennial Reading of Party History, Reading Every Day" that he planned, edited and produced. The column was launched on the official website of the institute on January 1 this year, and has become a "hot" column for party history study that is loved by party members and cadres and netizens. Based on this, the Exhibition Hall of the History of the Communist Party of China also produced a "Party History Calendar" and a "Party History Notebook.".

"The implementation of this column is very difficult, and Lu Jia has taken the initiative to work overtime." Guo Weiwei, a second-level inspector of the Seventh Research Department responsible for content review, said frankly. Columns are launched in the form of logs, which are published uninterrupted every day. Up to now, Lu Jia has reviewed more than 10 million words of original materials and more than 5,700 pictures, and finally edited into more than 4,000 entries, totaling 1.3 million words, and selected nearly 500 pictures. In order to ensure that the content is accurate, he repeatedly verifies each picture.

At the same time, Lu Jia also undertakes the editing of the institute's website and Weibo, and the usual schedule is very full. "Party History For a Hundred Years: Reading Every Day" is a column he actively planned, and can only be completed in his spare time.

"The more I know about the history of the party, the more I feel that the party is glorious and great. I want to make good use of new media to attract more people to understand the glorious history of the party!" Lu Jia said.

In 2004, after graduating from University, Lu Jia went to work in the Scientific Research Management Department of the former Central Literature Research Office. As a high-end platform for the study of the party's history and theory, the institute has accumulated a wealth of party history literature resources. How to make good use of these resources and disseminate them? Lu Jia constantly puts forward new requirements for herself.

His first task was to participate in the construction of a database of party history documents. With the completion of more than 10 databases such as "Party History, National History, Military History" and "Important Documents of the Party", the old experts have bid farewell to the previous way of copying cards to accumulate data, and their work efficiency has been greatly improved. Since then, Lu Jia has participated in the creation of the official website of the Central Literature Research Office and the official website of the Central Party History and Literature Research Institute.

Let the party history "live" and let young people love to read and love to read, and Lu Jia put forward higher work goals for herself. 2019 is the 70th anniversary of the founding of New China, and Lu Jia painstakingly pondered what ways to vividly show this great journey. Seeing that his son, who was in the third grade of elementary school, was particularly fascinated by comics, he had a flash of inspiration: Why not try to tell the story of party history with comics?

"The comic version, it's awesome!" As soon as the party history cartoon cooperated with the people's network was launched, it immediately attracted a large number of netizens, and the first issue of the "Founding Ceremony" alone exceeded 80 million reads on major platforms.

"This job is very meaningful, no matter how tired you are, you must persevere!" At present, Lu Jia is busy preparing for the "Party History Every Day Study" knowledge quiz competition, organizing and carrying out short video exhibition and broadcast activities for party history stories, collecting and publishing books entitled "Party History Centennial Reading Every Day", and producing comics for a hundred years of Party history... On the way to talk about the history of the party, he was still busy.

Li Shao, Associate Professor, School of Marxism, Tsinghua University:

Inspire students with the power of truth

"In Teacher Li's class, she will take you to the historical context of that time, restore the problems and choices faced by the party, sort out the context, and make people realize that the Chinese Communists are the most determined people who stand at the head of the tide." Wang Bowei, a 2019 doctoral student at tsinghua University's School of Marxism, was attracted to Li Shao's class for the first time.

In the hearts of the students, Li Shao, an associate professor of the "post-80s" of the Marxist College of Tsinghua University, is more like a kind friend. After 12 years of ideological and political education, Li Shao's "Outline of Modern and Contemporary Chinese History" (hereinafter referred to as the "Outline") is a compulsory course for all first-year students in the school, and it is often "difficult to find a lesson" in the course selection season. "There are challenges but more rewards" – this is the common feeling of students who have taken party history classes.

In Li Shuo's view, the "Outline" is an uncompromising course in party history, "the core is to profoundly understand history and how the people chose Marxism and the Chinese Communist Party in the context of national history, so as to strengthen their political identification with the Communist Party of China." Li Shao's party history class shows the important role of the Communist Party of China in a broader historical coordinate system from a comparative perspective, thus enhancing the mission of young people in the new era.

Every spring semester, Li Shuo will teach students in two parallel classes, each with more than 200 students. This year, she added another class with 600 students. How to make the teaching of party history in the large class taste interesting? Li Shuo's answer is to build a trinity of ideological and political science classes for teachers, teaching assistants, and students, and truly turn the ideological and political science classes into classes for students to participate in together.

Li Bao's reform of teaching design innovation began in 2016 and has now been iterated to "version 6.0". "The traditional education model is 'I teach you to learn', and the participation of students means that learning does not only occur in class, but also before class, in class, after class, and students also participate in the main lecture." Li Shuo said.

This innovative reform of teaching design guides students to understand history from historical materials, so that students who listen to lectures have a sense of participation and achievement. The whole class reads in groups, the teaching assistant team cooperates to hold a micro-salon, and the online teaching is linked across the network... Each semester,30 books are set up in the Outline, one for each group to read, discuss, and think under the leadership of a teaching assistant. Starting from Outline 4.0, Li Shao also added a "group fight" link to the display - under the theme of each lesson, 6 groups competed, which group spoke more accurately, more logically, and more brilliantly, and which group could get extra points. Under this design, students are connected into a community of learning, which stimulates different sparks in the collision of ideas.

Li Shuo feels that when talking about party history, we must put ourselves in the position of restoring its complexity, and we must look at the essence through the phenomenon, so that the micro-narrative in party history will have a taste: "The curriculum design and content innovation I did is mainly to build the 'skeleton' of history, and the students formed the 'flesh and bones' of history through independent reading, study, and discussion. The purpose of the ideological and political science class is to cultivate people with virtue, and teachers should use the power of truth to inspire students, win students with profound theoretical skills, and consciously serve as an example for learning to be a person. ”

Zhai Tianlin, teacher of the School of Arts of Nantong University:

Use non-genetic inheritance of red genes

On the campus of Nantong University in Jiangsu Province, a 100-meter-long red-themed torn paper scroll attracted many teachers and students to stop and watch: from the red boat in the South Lake to the Nanchang Uprising, from the founding of New China to the comprehensive construction of a well-off society... The important historical events of the 100 years since the founding of the Communist Party of China have been condensed into vivid tearing paper works.

As the initiator of the "Intangible Cultural Heritage Tearing Paper Presents The History of the Party and the Centennial History casts glory" tearing paper art exhibition and the creator of the 100-meter-long scroll, 27-year-old Zhai Tianlin was born in the paper-tearing family - Xuzhou "Zhai Family Compound", is the representative inheritor of the intangible cultural heritage tearing paper art project, and a full-time teacher of the Art College of Nantong University.

Zhai Tianlin began to study art at the age of 3, learned to tear paper with the elders of the family from the age of 4, and became the inheritor at the age of 18. "Zhai Family Compound has accumulated rich and heavy experience in tearing paper, and each generation has made breakthroughs and innovations. So what kind of road should I take? A letter in 2017 gave her guidance: "In that year, the Ministry of Education organized the 'Youth Red Dream Building Tour' practical activities, and the participating teams went to Yan'an to carry out practical activities to help accurately alleviate poverty through college students' innovation and entrepreneurship projects." The Zhai family compound paper tearing project was also selected. Zhai Tianlin said that after the practical activities, all the team members wrote to General Secretary Xi Jinping to report on the harvest and experience, and did not expect to receive a reply from General Secretary Xi Jinping.

"After reading the reply, I was very excited and determined to go to more revolutionary holy places to pursue the history of the red and add new elements to the traditional tearing paper." In the next three years or so, she went to more than 60 red revolutionary bases across the country to collect wind, while deeply understanding the glorious history of the Communist Party of China, and on the other hand, she integrated what she saw and felt into the creation of paper-tearing art.

In 2018, The Suzhou University of Science and Technology, where Zhai Tianlin studied, held a special exhibition for more than 200 red works she created, and asked her to tell teachers and students about the creative process. "At the beginning, I mainly displayed my works and their art forms; seeing that everyone was very interested in my experience on the road, I added the experience of collecting style in the revolutionary base; and then later, when the students asked more and more professional questions and hoped to understand more and more history, I read a lot of historical materials, carefully produced speeches, sorted out the works and stories in historical order, and strived to tell accurately, vividly and logically." Zhai Tianlin said that the form of talking about party history in this way is very popular, and the more times they talk about it, the deeper their understanding of party history will be for themselves and their classmates.

The expression of the fusion of traditional intangible cultural heritage and red stories has attracted many members of the public. More people watched the exhibition and listened to the history of the party, and she added a new interactive link: immersive experience, through live teaching to tear paper, so that the red story can be felt.

After graduating from graduate school last year, Zhai Tianlin came to Nantong University to teach at the School of Arts, and set up a paper-tearing club, a paper-tearing workshop, and a paper-tearing research institute to continue and innovate the course form of "intangible cultural heritage party history." In order to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, she invited party history experts to guide and selected the red works created in the past three years and made them into 100-meter-long scrolls.

At the beginning of the summer vacation, Zhai Tianlin and the students took 100 meters long scrolls and 100 works into the Party School of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China, Tsinghua University, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and other places to carry out paper-tearing art and cultural exchanges. Since 2018, Zhai Tianlin has walked into colleges and universities, government offices, and street communities and held more than 600 art party history classes.

Wang Yali, docent of the Nanliang Revolution Memorial Hall:

If they can "talk" about it, they must also be able to "understand" the history of the Party

In the middle of summer, the Nanliang Revolution Memorial Hall, located in the Meridian Ridge of Qingyang Bridge Mountain in Gansu Province, stands quietly at the 34-meter-high Martyrs' Monument.

"We know what they are called, but we don't know who they are; we don't know who they are, but we always know who they are for!" Let's pronounce the names of the heroes in unison, they are..." In the face of another group of university students who came to study, Wang Yali was leading them to recite the names engraved on the stele, a habit she had developed over the years.

In 2007, 22-year-old Wang Yali came to Huachi County, Qingyang City, and was recruited to enter the Nanliang Revolution Memorial Hall as a docent. The memorial hall was built to commemorate the revolutionary activities of the Shaanxi-Gansu military and civilians led by proletarian revolutionaries such as Liu Zhidan, Xie Zichang, Xi Zhongxun and other proletarian revolutionaries in the early 1930s of the last century.

In order to tell the history of the revolution well, Wang Yali was very persistent, and she did not stop until she learned to understand it. To this end, she read books at night, took notes, tried to speak during the day, made summaries, cycled back and forth, accumulated day by day, hoarded more than 10 notebooks, and after two years, she could finally be alone.

Once, Wang Yali received a group of tourists from northern Shaanxi, in front of the monument, an old man in his 70s came forward to hold her hand, the old tears flowed, pointing to the names of the 7 martyrs surnamed Wang on the monument, his voice trembled and said, "These are the ancestors of my family, thank you for letting the world remember their names!"

Wang Yali was very touched. Since then, her explanation has added a "prescribed action": each reception must stay in front of the monument for a period of time, lead everyone to read the name on the monument, and talk about "a group of martyrs".

The explanation words have been memorized, I thought that the work would be smooth in the future, but I did not expect that in a lecture, Wang Yali was embarrassed by a group of students. Once, when receiving student tourists, Wang Yali fluently told the history of the anti-"encirclement and suppression" struggle three times, and just when she habitually wanted to go to the next exhibition hall, she was puzzled by the students' question: "Who is Shi Baniu?" "Which unit is the 17th Route Army?" "Where did Liu Zhidan's brother go later?" Wang Yali was asked and stammered.

"You can't just talk about it and can't explain it anymore!" Memorizing the explanatory words is the simplest thing, and it is necessary to sort out the historical context clearly and transform it into its own things in order to attract young students. Wang Yali realized the reason, "When talking about party history, we must not only be able to talk about it, but also be able to answer various questions." ”

Starting from the collection of the history of the revolutionary struggle in Shaanxi and Gansu, Wang Yali read all the books she could find at that time, dozens of them, and read and read the history of the Long March. Finding that the explanatory words in the past can be enriched, she took the lead in sorting out the "Outline of Explanatory Words in the Shaanxi-Gansu Revolutionary History Exhibition Hall" to dig deep into the stories behind historical figures and revolutionary cultural relics.

The reserve of historical knowledge is enough, and the form of explanation must be innovative. Wang Yali constantly tries to introduce interesting and immersive explanations, describing battle scenes in words, and integrating herself and tourists into historical events. With the help of new media, virtual reality lectures and experiential teaching are carried out, and the effect is unexpectedly good. Since the launch of party history study and education, Wang Yali has inherited the spirit of Nanliang and preached more than 60 party history and party lessons. Since joining the work, she has served more than 300,000 people.

Layout design: Zhang Danfeng

People's Daily ( 2021-08-01 05 edition)