Education officials in Shanghai are downgrading the Mao myth in the high school curriculum:

When high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks
this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history
text drops wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of
colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and
globalization.
   

Socialism has been reduced to a single,
short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese
Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a
sentence. The text mentions Mao only once — in a chapter on etiquette.

  Globalization requires its own usable history, one that ignores  potentially market-upsetting ideas such as class struggle and revolution and emphasizes cosmopolitan and liberal ideals (even if the latter are honored more in the breach).  Mao is not a fitting face for Chinese globalization.  Better to let him slip down the memory hole (perhaps they can now take the picture down from Tiananmen Gate?).

    This is not too surprising.  History is always reinterpreted to suit the needs of prevailing political powers.  And this has always been the practice of history writing in China.

    But the new history glosses over the most tragic and politically embarrassing episodes of modern Chinese history:

The Shanghai textbook revisions do not address many domestic and
foreign concerns about the biased way Chinese schools teach recent
history. Like the old textbooks, for example, the new ones play down
historic errors or atrocities like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural
Revolution and the army crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy
demonstrators in 1989.

 The avoidance of the greatest failures of Chinese socialism in Chinese schools brings to mind this passage from Confucius:

If things far away don’t concern you, you’ll soon mourn things close at hand. (Analects 15.12)

 Now, I may be taking a bit of license here, putting a temporal meaning on spatial terms ("far away," "close at hand."), but I think a historical interpretation is in keeping with the spirit of Confucius.  History matters.  If we do not attend honestly and openly to historical controversies, they may come back – be brought back in one form or another – to haunt us.  Better to air the full extent of Maoist tyrannies than to try to hide them under globalized happy faces.  Young people in China should be aware of how many Chinese died during the Great Leap Forward in the name of preserving a horrifically flawed Maoist ideology.  It would give them a better understanding of their own circumstances and times.

    So, maybe we should not bury Mao just yet.  After all, with the thirtieth anniversary of his death almost upon us, we need to remember all those who died as a result of his abuses of power.