THE DEPARTMENT of precision engineering of Qing Hua University in Beijing's western suburbs is an old, Soviet-style edifice with severe lines and rectangular columns, many cracked columns. Inside, the paint is peeling off the walls, and some of the window panes are broken.
In this unprepossessing building, in a small room off a gloomy basement corridor, a dozen postgraduate programmers are working on Compaq computer terminals to produce the first-ever Chinese patriot games.
These are computer games in which the players will have an opportunity to reverse Chinese history, or as the head of the project, Mr Nanzheng Yang, put it: "to restore balance in an imbalanced world."
Mr Yang typed in several commands onto the Miscrosoft software of a terminal to show work in progress on a game called Wipe Out Shame. In this game, the player will have the chance to bring about the defeat of the British in the struggle for Hong Kong and in the opium wars of the 19th century.
Was this not rewriting history, I asked Mr Yang, whose business card describes him as a former lieutenant-colonel in the People's Liberation Army. `No," he replied. `The video game will have the facts of history. The player will be faced with the challenge of organising the facts to win the game.
Mr Yang referred scathingly to foreign computer wargames already on the streets, including Japanese products "which would make the player believe that Hitler won the second World War."
The Chinese still feel a sense of shame at their defeat by the British, who raised the Union Jack on Hong Kong island in 1841 and forced the Chinese to sign the Treaty of Nanjing the following year.
Mr Yang's basement laboratory has also come up with an answer to the flooding of the video games market in China with American products in which the Rambotype US forces blast away their sometimes Oriental opponents.
He is working on another computer game based on the Korean war in which daring Chinese pilots in black leather helmets manoeuvre their MiG-15 fighter planes over a brown Korean landscape to shoot dawn US pilots in superior aircraft.
The early phase of the 1950-1953 Korean war, in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese volunteers" died, did in fact produce Chinese-US air battles.
The new video games, which will be marketed in December by Golden Discs Ltd, a joint venture with a Hong Kong company, are being produced at a time when a mood of nationalism is sweeping China, with encouragement from the top.
"Since last year, the country has witnessed a surge of patriotism and our company wants to conform with the trend." said the retired Red Army officer.
"Our children today don't know anything about history, or the revolution, so they make games where you have to know the names of famous generals to win, he said.
The Chinese Communist Party's annual plenum, which took place in Beijing this week, emphasised a "spiritual civilisation" campaign to create a perfect communist state.
The campaign is being promoted by the Chinese President, Mr Jiang Zemin, to strengthen the party's position while maintaining a grip on "material civilisation" in a capital-based economy.
Among other things, it advocates giving media prominence to socialist role models. Today Chinese heroes cannot be fighter pilots shooting down Americans, but the papers have this week been highlighting the model communist performance of Ms Li Suli, the conductress of No 21 bus in Beijing. She gives newspapers to passengers, provides cushions for babies, administers first aid and can talk in English to foreigners.
Another small group has been given hero status in the party-controlled press this week. These are four young men who "safeguarded national dignity and self-esteem" by refusing to continue working for a Japanese company in Tianjin which was producing computer games for the foreign market showing heroic Japanese soldiers smashing inferior Chinese forces in the last World War.
Returning from the university I saw a queue outside a cinema just west of Tiananmen Square where a new documentary film about the Chinese fight against US-led forces in Korea has been playing to approving audiences since last Sunday.
The documentary leaves the viewer in no doubt that China defeated the US army. In a word play on the title of a best-selling anti-American book, China Can Say No, the billboard outside proclaims: "This was a time when China did say No."