New | From Napoleon to Great Wall's stature in space: Top 5 Chinese school textbook controversies
Errors in official Chinese school textbooks are a hot topic for the mainland media, with stories about mistakes and misrepresentations providing a rare and relatively safe opportunity for the public to criticise the government.
While provinces are permitted to publish their own primary school textbooks, content is shared across books which may be read by millions of readers for generations, making the potential cost of mistakes incredibly high.
While the Chinese authorities do not generally allow people to discuss politically sensitive issues, such as the authenticity of certain national martyrs' biographies, criticisms of technical errors are usually tolerated by the censors, and some mistakes even get corrected. SCMP reporters have sifted through some of the more egregious errors, ranking them by duration, impact, and controversy.