From The South China Morning Post, via A Glimpse of the World:
The doctoring of Japanese school textbooks to omit negative portrayals of its wartime conduct has provoked an outcry in East Asia, but one doesn’t have to look far to discover that every nation has its own version of history.
It also becomes evident that the perfect place to sow the seeds of fervent nationalism is in the classroom with young impressionable minds.
This summer, new Chinese history textbooks for Hong Kong senior secondary school students have hit the shelves. For the first time the texts include events up to the end of the last century – including the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 – under the revised curriculum for Form Four and Five students. Previously, the Hong Kong curriculum only covered the years up to 1976.
Controversy erupted when the contents of the textbooks first came to light a few months ago, with educators accusing the authors of the Hong Kong textbooks of “distorting history” by failing to detail the bloody crackdown by the central government on pro-democracy protesters.
