End of the Little Red Book

Where's Mao? Chinese Revise History Books - New York Times

"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."

I remember my 7th grade Social Studies class which focused one semester each on the two then most significant enemies of the U.S.: the Soviet Union and China. My instructor was a Vietnam veteran who had become disillusioned with American policy, so the class was by no means a harangue against the evils of communism, but it was nonetheless something that instilled a fear of the powerful enemies ranged against us. For my class project I used a faux-leather menu cover from The Apple Grove Inn where my mother worked to make a Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. Who would have thought then that the whole subject of that class would all be insignificant just 30 years later? Lends credence to the Buddhist notion that our focus on what we think is permanent is in fact the thing that creates much unnecessary suffering.