Mao Tse-tung, one of history's greatest mass murderers, and the tyrant who ruled China with an iron fist for 27 years, has all but vanished from China's newest history books.
Instead of reading about the blood-soaked history of Mao's reign, students in Shanghai will be learning about J. P. Morgan, Bill Gates, the New York Stock Exchange, the space shuttle and Japan’s bullet train.
According to Friday's New York Times, China's new standard world history text eliminates mentions of "wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization."
Even socialism get short shrift in the new texts, although it is still referred to as having a "glorious future.” The changes now initially limited to Shanghai cover socialism in what the Times called "a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course," and Chinese Communism prior to the onset of 1979's economic reform is covered in a single sentence. Mao is mentioned just once - in a chapter on etiquette.
It's all part of a government effort to banish the grim history of Chinese Communism under Mao and promote "a more stable, less violent view of Chinese history that serves today’s economic and political goals," the history book's authors told the Times.
"Our traditional version of history was focused on ideology and national identity,” Zhu Xueqin, a historian at Shanghai University told the Times. "The new history is less ideological, and that suits the political goals of today.”
That last sentence says it all.
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