By Clifford Coonan
FOR graphic accounts of Japanese atrocities in China, there are few better places to look than Chinese history textbooks, adorned as they are with pictures of soldiers preparing to bayonet thousands of people in Nanking in 1937.
But although China has objected forcefully to a Japanese textbook referring to the massacre as an “incident”, its own teaching of Chinese history may also be regarded as an economical version of the truth.
The deaths of an estimated 30m people from starvation during Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s economic and social campaign he called “the Great Leap Forward” between 1958 and 1960 are omitted from textbooks. Nor does the authorities’ bloody suppression of pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 rate a mention.
In China History, the most commonly used textbook for 13 to 15-year-olds, the early chapters contain images of Japanese atrocities from the 1890s. during the first Sino-Japanese war. After detailed descriptions of horrors visited upon China during Japan’s brutal occupation of the country up to 1945, most of the book’s contents are devoted to Communist party successes since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949.
The occupation of Tibet in 1951, which was the subject of international condemnation, is interpreted as a liberation and the flight of the Dalai Lama, the Himalayan kingdom’s religious leader, into exile is overlooked.
The Korean war of 1950-53 in which China backed the North Korean advance into South Korea, is said to have been launched by “American imperialists fighting to the Chinese border and threatening Chinese security”.
The book acknowledges that “many scary things” took place during Mao’s cultural revolution, between 1966 and 1976 , but this refers more to the attempts of Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, and her “Gang of Four” to take over the Communist party.
