Why is China so afraid of its own past??

I won't even 'go there' about China's efforts to teach its own view of Chinese/world history. If I were to voice any opinions.... well, you know what would happen.

Read the NY Times (article) and determine for yourselves whether or not China is being 'straight forward' with her students.

This country has made a national pastime of wagging its finger at its neighbor, Japan, which it regularly scolds for not teaching the "correct history" about Japan's invasion of China in the 1930's, straining relations between Asia's biggest powers.

However, a visit to a Chinese high school classroom and an examination of several of the most widely used history textbooks here reveal a mishmash of historical details that many Chinese educational experts themselves say are highly selective and often provide a deeply distorted view of the recent past.

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.