aware of the rough analogy between their present growth-and-ambitiousness position, and the ones of Japan and Germany before those countries each started world wars. However, Beijing sees itself as having a much more than even chance of winning. Given the PRC's huge population, and ever improving strategic depth and dispersion as side benefits of rushed development throughout their vast interior, they won't blanch at a thermonuclear confrontation once they're ready; at the rate that American public casualty-aversiveness is growing, we'd blink first and China knows it.

Thus, according to the formal ideology (and in practical implementation too), the peaceful development road doesn't lead to peace, it leads to battle and only later to peace after victory. The Long War on Terror, in which Beijing already plays shrewd games against both sides, is to be exploited as a way to distract and wear down America while China steadily prepares for what my previous Passdown essay labeled this “Long-Off War” in the Pacific and beyond. To the PRC, the two wars don't exclude each other conceptually, as many in the U.S. appear to think. Rather, they're intimately connected in time and space, the LWOT a convenient prelude to the impending main event. (China might be inadvertantly handing our defense authorities a Rosetta Stone here, to resolve the divisive Beltway dichotomy between fighting one war and preparing for the next. If so, it behooves us to carefully examine the pictograms written on that stone.)

Hopefully, readers will now better understand the true background and impact of the revisions to Shanghai's history textbooks. Pragmatically, China needs a worldly-wise elite in order to optimize its targeted gains from carefully compartmentalized globalization. It won't do for Beijing's heirs to the mantle of power, including the so-called “princelings” (children of China's leaders of the past 30 years), to come across on the world stage as a gaggle of retro bumpkins. One must also bear in mind that only the history curriculum is changing. Mandatory courses in politics, CCP-style, remain. So does the standard post-Tianenmen xenophobic and patriotism engendering practice of how to teach reading in grammar school. This practice relies on anecdotes glorifying young people who helped fight the Japanese in World War II, resisted Chiang Kaishek's army during the 1949 Civil War, or endured great toils to help their collective's work team exceed its production quota during the Great Leap Forward. That's as Maoist as you can get.

Yes, the East is still Red, as red as the national ensigns flown on People's Liberation Army Navy ships and submarines.