Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a thrice-weekly update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. register here.
China ordered a national review of school textbooks after illustrations deemed ugly, sexually suggestive and secretly pro-American caused a public uproar.
You are reading: Math books outrage china
The news has alarmed some experts and parents who fear that the campaign is turning into a political witch hunt and represents an unnecessary tightening of the already strict censorship of cultural publications in the country.
The drawings, found in a number of math textbooks that have been used in Chinese primary schools for nearly a decade, are controversial for a number of reasons.
Some Chinese netizens have criticized the images of children with small, droopy, parted eyes and large foreheads as ugly, offensive and racist.
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others have been outraged by what they see as sexual overtones in the drawings. some of the images show young boys with a bulge in their pants that looks like the outline of their genitals; in an illustration of children playing a game, one boy has his hands on a girl’s chest while another tugs on a girl’s skirt; in another drawing, a girl’s underwear is exposed as she jumps rope.
Internet users have also accused the illustrations of being “pro-American”, because they show several children dressed in clothes printed with stars and stripes and the colors of the American flag.
A drawing that showed an inaccurate representation of the stars on the Chinese flag was accused of being “anti-Chinese”.
Outrage over the illustrations has dominated discussions on Chinese social media since Thursday, when photos of the drawings first circulated online. Various related hashtags have racked up tens of millions of views on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform.
many expressed dismay and anger that such “poor” illustrations had not only made it into textbooks published by the state-owned publisher of popular education, the nation’s largest textbook publisher founded in 1950, but had passed unnoticed for so many years (textbooks have been in use across the country since 2013). others questioned how these textbooks had passed the country’s notoriously strict publication review process.
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Influential nationalists were quick to blame “Western cultural infiltration”, claiming, without giving evidence, that the illustrators had been covertly working for “foreign forces”, especially from the US, to corrupt the souls of Chinese children innocent.
Amid the uproar, the popular education press said on Thursday that it would withdraw the textbooks and redesign the illustrations, but that failed to calm the public’s anger.
On Saturday, China’s education ministry stepped in and ordered the publisher to “correct and reform” its publications and ensure that the new version would be available by the fall semester. it also ordered a “thorough inspection” of textbooks across the country to ensure that teaching materials “adhere to the correct political directions and values, promote outstanding Chinese culture, and conform to public aesthetic tastes.”
but the campaign is not only about aesthetic and moral values, there is also an ideological component. Textbooks have been front and center in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s efforts to tighten ideological control over the country’s youth and fend off the influence of “Western values.”
Under xi, the Chinese government banned foreign teaching materials, including textbooks and classic novels, in all public primary and secondary schools, stating that all teaching materials “must reflect
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