It comes as no surprise that China’s Textbooks Twist and Omit History:
Most Chinese students finish high school convinced that their country has fought wars only in self-defense, never aggressively or in conquest, despite the People’s Liberation Army’s invasion of Tibet in 1950 and the ill-fated war with Vietnam in 1979, to take two examples.Similarly, many believe that Japan was defeated largely as a result of Chinese resistance, not by the United States.
‘The fundamental reason for the victory is that the Chinese Communist Party became the core power that united the nation,’ says one widely used textbook, referring to World War II.
No one learns that perhaps 30 million people died from famine because of catastrophic decisions made in the 1950′s, during the Great Leap Forward, by the founder of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
Similar elisions occur in everything from the start of the Korean War, with an invasion of South Korea by China’s ally, North Korea, to the history of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as an irrevocable part of China.