Excerpts from “The Hundred-Year Marathon” book Part 3

At my [the author’s] invitation, three graduate students from China’s National Foreign Affairs University toured the museum with me. They were in training to become diplomats, and they were well educated from the perspective of the Chinese Communist government. They did not, however, know much about the one hundred thousand Chinese civilians killed by the Boxer rebels, or the role of America’s aid to China in World War II, or the death of twenty million Chinese in Mao’s political campaign and famine from 1959 to 1962, or the death of millions more in a Cultural Revolution that closed the nation’s universities and tore China apart from 1966 to 1976. And although they had heard of the Tiananmen Square protests, they knew better than to talk about them.

The graduate students were the product of a decision made by Deng Xiaoping in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre—which occurred a mere two hundred yards from the museum that doesn’t mention it. After 1989, Deng chose to align with Li Peng and other hard-liners to solidify Party control. Never again, the leaders vowed, would China’s students build Statues of Liberty, quote from the Declaration of Independence, and look to America’s values as admirable alternatives to those of the Chinese Communist Party.* Within a year, textbooks had been rewritten to cast America as China’s archvillain, and new policies and regulations ensured that only this official view of America made it into China’s classrooms and libraries.

In the latest Chinese version of history, the first American villain is President John Tyler. In the Treaty of Wangxia, signed in 1844, Tyler imposed on China what Mao called “the first unequal treaty signed as a result of U.S. aggression against China.” A launching pad for American manipulation of the Chinese, the treaty opened the door to U.S. “illegal actions to exploit China,” according to the textbooks assigned to Chinese students.

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In the United States, of course, Lincoln is remembered as the honest rail-splitter who held the Union together, freed the slaves, and paid for his principles with his life. But in China, he’s just another brutal, thuggish American imperialist. A professor at Renmin University named Shi Yinhong has argued that Lincoln wanted “China to be dominated, or even exploited, within the international community.”

Source: The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (2015) by Michael Pillsbury.

*Dictators ban any references to liberty because it might make the people want freedom and that might start a revolution like the American revolution and that scares the heck out of the ruling class.