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World - AP Asia By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer SHANGHAI, China - Some things you won't find in Chinese history textbooks : the 1989 democracy movement, the millions who died in a famine caused by misguided communist policies or China's military attacks on India and Vietnam.
AP Photo As China criticizes Japan for new textbooks that critics say minimize war time abuses like the Japanese military forcing Asian women into sexual s lavery, Beijing's own schoolbooks have significant omissions about the c ommunist system's own history and relations with its neighbors. "With rising Chinese nationalism, the efforts to rewrite history, to rein terpret history according to the demands of nationalism have become a ma jor national pastime," said Maochun Yu, a history professor at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md Experts say China's textbooks are written to heighten a sense of national victimhood and glorify the Communist Party that seized power in a 1949 revolution and lashes out at any threat to its rule. The books describe those who died fighting Japan and other outsiders as h aving "gloriously sacrificed" themselves for China. Propaganda paintings reproduced in schoolbooks show Chinese struggling ag ainst foreign invaders poses imitated by protesters who threw rocks at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing over the weekend during violent anti-Ja panese demonstrations in several Chinese cities. An eighth-grade history book used in Shanghai, China's most cosmopolitan city, repeatedly refers to Japanese by an insulting phrase that roughly translates as "Jap bandits." The book focuses on Japanese atrocities and repeats China's claim that 35 million Chinese died or were injured during their 1937-45 war. "Wherever the Japanese army went, they burned, killed, stole and plundere d," the book says. Omissions of major events appear aimed at shoring up China's image of its elf as a non-aggressor, especially since the 1949 revolution. The books don't mention the brief but bloody 1962 border war with India t hat broke out when Chinese troops attacked Indian positions to enforce t erritorial claims. There is nothing on the 1979 war when Chinese troops attacked Vietnam.
Khme r Rouge regime in Cambodia, which was an ally of Beijing. Also missing: _The 1989 crackdown on democracy demonstrations, when Chinese troops kill ed hundreds and possibly thousands of unarmed protesters.
South Korea a t the start of the 1950-53 Korean War, a conflict that drew in troops fr om the United States and other countries on the side of the South and Ch ina's army in support of the North. The texts say only that "civil war broke out," without mentioning how it started. America is portrayed as an invader that forced Beijing to inter vene by threatening Chinese territory. A seventh-grade text also accuses the US military of using biological w eapons during the Korean War, repeating a claim made by China, North Kor ea and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War but never proven. While Japan's distortions of its history appear driven by a reluctance to accept shame, China's are aimed at preserving communist rule, said Sin- ming Shaw, a China scholar at Oxford University in England. "Not owning up is a calculated political policy," Shaw said.
The informati on contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewr itten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associ ated Press.
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