China’s Education Ministry has ordered a nationwide review of all elementary school, high school and university textbooks after illustrations in widely used mathematics textbooks for elementary school students were criticized online as ugly, sexually suggestive and anti-China.
The textbooks, published by the state-run People’s Education Press, have been in use for about a decade, according to Chinese news reports. But there has been an outcry on Chinese social media since last week, when illustrations from the books were posted on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter.