Chinese Elementary Education and Psychology

While PRC history textbooks have always stoked nationalist fervor and xenophobia, these same attitudes were now to be inserted into everything from beginning readers to junior high school social science textbooks to high school political education classes. The resulting kindergarten-through-college curriculum has been custom-designed to breed young national narcissists.

A second-grade reader includes the story of a young cowherd who “led the Japanese devils into an ambush” by the Communist Eighth Route Army during the Second World War, sacrificing her own life in the process. Another primer, “Ten Must-Knows for Elementary School Students,” issued to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, cites “one hundred years of Chinese people opposing foreign aggression” as the raison d’être for the country’s founding. An eighth-grade social science textbook begins, “Our motherland in history was once an advanced and great nation . . . but after the invasions of the European and American capitalist Great Powers, a profound national crisis occurred.”

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What this patriotic education comprises, in broad strokes, is a kind of Chinese Mein Kampf. Like Hitler’s work, it lays out a grand strategy for world domination. Winston Churchill’s summation of Mein Kampf has to be altered very little to describe the story the Chinese people are hearing from their government today:

The Chinese are a great race that for millennia has rightly dominated its known world. But the foreign imperialists humbled us, brutally tearing off and devouring living parts of the Chinese race and nation, even threatening the whole with disunity. But China has now stood up and is fighting back, determined to recover her lost grandeur no less than her lost territories. We must be wary of things foreign, absorbing only those that make us stronger and rejecting those, like Christianity and Western ideas of democracy and human rights, which make us weaker. The first duty of the Chinese state is therefore to nationalize the masses and resist these foreign ideas.

Only the Chinese Communist Party has the will and determination to lead the struggle. The new China must gather within its fold all the scattered Chinese elements in Asia. A people that has suffered a century and a half of Western humiliation can be rescued by reviving its self-confidence. To restore the Chinese nation, the PLA must become modernized and invincible. The world is now moving toward a new millennium, and the Chinese state must see to it that the Chinese race is ready to assume its proper place in the world as the hegemon.

And it is all too easy to imagine Xi Jinping saying, as Hitler did in the conclusion to Mein Kampf, “A state which in this age of racial poisoning dedicates itself to the care of its best racial elements must some day become lord of the earth. Just substitute the word hegemon for “lord of the earth”—which, come to think of it, is a pretty good synonym—and you have the gist of Beijing’s program.

Source: Bully of Asia: Why China's Dream Is the New Threat to World Order (2017) by Steven W. Mosher.