As one professor at Peking University put it to me: "The emphasis on exploitation by foreigners won’t change. That is what everybody here is taught to believe from the age of six." As foreigners seek to engage modern China, it is important that they understand how China views its own past. Every Chinese schoolchild is taught about the Opium War waged by the British. Oddly enough, I cannot remember the subject coming up in my history classes at school in the UK . . . It would surely help foreign leaders to deal with China if they knew much more about the country’s past. Yet while educated Americans and Europeans usually know quite a lot about each other’s history, a similar knowledge of China’s past is almost entirely lacking.
Gideon Rachman. 2012. China’s past needs to be rewritten. Financial Times, 12 March