The victorious peasant army and cadre corps of the Chinese Communists initially had to rely on a large body of Nationalist officials in the cities to govern the country. It took a few years for these holdovers to be replaced, and their socialist replacements were eager to apply a distinctly different approach to their tasks, one inspired by the Soviet Union's example (White 1983:30). Mao referred to this process of learning from the Soviet Union as "leaning to one side" (yi bian dao); he strongly urged the Chinese people to remake their country along Soviet lines (Teiwes 1988:11) and to learn from their Soviet "Elder Brother" (Sulian lao dage). Soviet institutions were adopted nationwide "as the primary models for imitation and, in some cases, wholesale transfer" (White 1983:30).
Yet to what degree the Chinese directly transferred Soviet forms and styles unchanged and to what degree similar goals and circumstances caused convergence in their systems is an open question. Ronald Price (1987:159) questions the assumption that all parallels are due to direct "borrowing." He asserts (166) that the general administrative setup in the two countries remained different even though there were striking similarities; these similarities, however, were not the result of simple "copying."
In academia, Soviet influence was strong but mostly consisted of reinforcing existing, Confucian concepts of education. Education in China had long been seen as essential "to maintenance of correct behavior and as essentially moral‐ political" (Price 1987:163). This certainly did not change under Chinese Communist administration. On the contrary, the principle of Party leadership in