School textbooks in China have a habit of bending the truth to suit Communist Party dogma or to reinforce moral messages. Rarely does anyone challenge them. Exams require rote learning, and children are not encouraged to question received wisdom. A group of 20 or so teachers from across China, however, has recently caused a stir by pointing out some mistakes.
Their efforts, widely reported in the official press, have steered clear of politically sensitive issues such as the party’s own record. Indeed the errors they have focused on sound little more than nitpicks. They question, for example, a commonly told tale (not just in China), that Thomas Edison, who was later to invent the light bulb, supposedly helped a doctor illuminate an operation performed on his mother by manipulating candles and mirrors.
In Chinese schools, however, the dividing line between historical fiction and history can easily be confused. Children are not taught to make a distinction. As a result, students lose the ability to look for and identify mistakes, says Leng Yubin, one of the teachers campaigning for a textbook purge. The press has quoted comparisons of these errors to the adulteration of milk with toxic melamine, which poisoned tens of thousands of infants last year.
China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, perhaps unwittingly stirred the debate recently when he visited a Beijing high school. After sitting at the back of a class, he pointed out a mistake. A textbook described the provinces of Shaanxi and Gansu as in north China, whereas they are officially in north-western China. Why, asked one widely circulated commentary, did it take the prime minister to point out such an error? The publishing house reportedly retorted that geographically speaking, north China is correct.
Such brushes with orthodoxy are unlikely to make much headway. Occasional reports have surfaced in the official press in recent years that Mao Zedong did not, contrary to widespread belief, declare on October 1, 1949 in Tiananmen Square that the Chinese people had “stood up”. (He said something like it at a less dramatic ceremony a few days earlier.) But during recent 60th anniversary celebrations of communist China’s founding, several reports in state controlled newspapers revived the old myth.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)