How Much Do you Know About the Chinese Literary Canon?

You've all seen the article on Columbia students who are supposedly traumatized by having to read too many white authors, right?

It's been making the round on the web, under various sarcastic headlines, such as this one here:
Columbia Student in Anguish Because She Has to Read Books by White People

I suspect the conservative websites who are widely reporting this event are exaggerating and getting the details mucked up.  (Something that happens quite frequently, according to this cracked.com article 4 Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Free Speech and College).   But as someone who has no insight into this particular set of events, I'll just take the articles at face value for the sake of argument.

Assuming the conservative complaints about censorship on college campuses are valid, I should state clearly that I'm against censorship.  I'm not advocating removing Ovid or Shakespeare from the curriculum by any means.  But there's no denying that there is a serious imbalance in the school curriculum. As someone who's lived in Asia for the past 13 years or so, I can perhaps offer another perspective.

I've spent 8 years in Japan, 4 years in Cambodia, and am in my first year in Vietnam.  I've never lived in China, but I can attest how big an influence the Chinese literary classics have on all other countries in Asia.  Chinese classic novels like Journey to the West (W) or Romance of the Three Kingdoms (W) are widely read and studied in every other South East Asian country (as well as anywhere there is a Chinese diaspora, like Malaysia).  In Japan, they are the source of numerous comics, television shows, and animated cartoons.  In Vietnam and Cambodia, all the school children instantly recognize these books.  Whenever I need an example of a famous novel that my students will recognize, these are always my go-to examples anywhere in Asia.
And these are just two examples of a rich, ancient, literary history that China has (W).

Now, how much does your average American university student know about Chinese literature?  Nothing, right?
Imagine all of those college literature majors out there, who consider themselves well-read, and can't even name a single work of Chinese literature.

That was certainly me at 23.  I studied literature and history at college.  I thought I was quite well read.  But I didn't have a clue about any Chinese literature.
I still haven't read these books, to be perfectly honest.  But at least now I have the decency to be ashamed of this gap in my literary history.  And at least now I'm aware that they exist and have a certain amount of passive knowledge about them, in the same way I know about Paradise Lost, Dante's Inferno, Don Quixote, and all the other books in the Western canon that everyone in the West knows about whether you've actually read them or not.

Now dig this--adding some Chinese books to the school curriculum would not be the equivalent of putting in obscure folk tales from some tribe in Africa that nobody's ever heard of just to keep the hippies happy (to illustrate the popular conservative parody of multiculturalism in U.S. schools.)  This is the literary canon of half-the world!  And barely anyone in the U.S even knows it exists!!

You'd think we could find a little bit of room for this in the classroom.

Addendum

Upon rereading this post, it strikes me that I actually didn't make my point very clearly.  So let me try again.  

We've been having the "diversity in the canon" debate for years now.  The left thinks that the canon is too dominated by white men, and wants to bring more marginalized voices into the canon.  The right mocks the left for wanting to bring in obscure writers at the expense of the tried and true classics.

It's astonishing to me how often in this debate, both the left and the right forget about China.  If you're looking to diversify the canon, then China has plenty of non-white writers.  If you are worried about diluting the canon with obscure writers, then the Chinese canon is the literary canon for half the world's population.