September 3, 2006

• no WAY!

  
  Where’s Mao? Chinese Revise History Books
  
  

  
  

  By JOSEPH KAHN
  New York Times

  Published: September 1, 2006

  BEIJING, Aug. 31 — When high school students in Shanghai
  crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise.
  The new standard world history text drops wars, dynasties and Communist
  revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology,
  social customs and globalization.

  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.

  Nearly overnight the country’s most
  prosperous schools have shelved the Marxist template that had dominated
  standard history texts since the 1950’s. The changes passed high-level
  scrutiny, the authors say, and are part of a broader effort to promote
  a more stable, less violent view of Chinese history that serves today’s
  economic and political goals.

  Supporters say the overhaul
  enlivens mandatory history courses for junior and senior high school
  students and better prepares them for life in the real world. The old
  textbooks, not unlike the ruling Communist Party, changed relatively
  little in the last quarter-century of market-oriented economic reforms.
  They were glaringly out of sync with realities students face outside
  the classroom. But critics say the textbooks trade one political agenda
  for another.

  They do not so much rewrite history as diminish it.
  The one-party state, having largely abandoned its official ideology,
  prefers people to think more about the future than the past.

  The
  new text focuses on ideas and buzzwords that dominate the state-run
  media and official discourse: economic growth, innovation, foreign
  trade, political stability, respect for diverse cultures and social
  harmony.

  J. P. Morgan, Bill Gates, the New York Stock Exchange, the space shuttle and Japan’s bullet train are all highlighted. There is a lesson on how neckties became fashionable.

  The
  French and Bolshevik Revolutions, once seen as turning points in world
  history, now get far less attention. Mao, the Long March, colonial
  oppression of China and the Rape of Nanjing are taught only in a compressed history curriculum in junior high.

  “Our
  traditional version of history was focused on ideology and national
  identity,” said Zhu Xueqin, a historian at Shanghai University. “The
  new history is less ideological, and that suits the political goals of
  today.”

  The changes are at least initially limited to Shanghai.
  That elite urban region has leeway to alter its curriculum and
  textbooks, and in the past it has introduced advances that the central
  government has instructed the rest of the country to follow.

  But
  the textbooks have provoked a lively debate among historians ahead of
  their full-scale introduction in Shanghai in the fall term. Several
  Shanghai schools began using the texts experimentally in the last
  school year.

  Many scholars said they did not regret leaving
  behind the Marxist perspective in history courses. It is still taught
  in required classes on politics. But some criticized what they saw as
  an effort to minimize history altogether. Chinese and world history in
  junior high have been compressed into two years from three, while the
  single year in senior high devoted to history now focuses on cultures,
  ideas and civilizations.

  “The junior high textbook castrates
  history, while the senior high school textbook eliminates it entirely,”
  one Shanghai history teacher wrote in an online discussion. The teacher
  asked to remain anonymous because he was criticizing the education
  authorities.

  Zhou Chunsheng, a professor at Shanghai Normal
  University and one of the lead authors of the new textbook series, said
  his purpose was to rescue history from its traditional emphasis on
  leaders and wars and to make people and societies the central theme.

  “History
  does not belong to emperors or generals,” Mr. Zhou said in an
  interview. “It belongs to the people. It may take some time for others
  to accept this, naturally, but a similar process has long been under
  way in Europe and the United States.”

  Mr. Zhou said the new
  textbooks followed the ideas of the French historian Fernand Braudel.
  Mr. Braudel advocated including culture, religion, social customs,
  economics and ideology into a new “total history.” That approach has
  been popular in many Western countries for more than half a century.

  Mr.
  Braudel elevated history above the ideology of any nation. China has
  steadily moved away from its ruling ideology of Communism, but the
  Shanghai textbooks are the first to try examining it as a phenomenon
  rather than preaching it as the truth.

  Socialism is still
  referred to as having a “glorious future.” But the concept is reduced
  to one of 52 chapters in the senior high school text. Revolutionary
  socialism gets less emphasis than the Industrial Revolution and the
  information revolution.

  Students now study Mao — still
  officially revered as the founding father of modern China but no longer
  regularly promoted as an influence on policy — only in junior high. In
  the senior high school text, he is mentioned fleetingly as part of a
  lesson on the custom of lowering flags to half-staff at state funerals,
  like Mao’s in 1976.

  Deng Xiaoping,
  who began China’s market-oriented reforms, appears in the junior and
  senior high school versions, with emphasis on his economic vision.

  Gerald
  A. Postiglione, an associate professor of education at the University
  of Hong Kong, said mainland Chinese education authorities had searched
  for ways to make the school curriculum more relevant.

  “The
  emphasis is on producing innovative thinking and preparing students for
  a global discourse,” he said. “It is natural that they would ask
  whether a history textbook that talks so much about Chinese suffering
  during the colonial era is really creating the kind of sophisticated
  talent they want for today’s Shanghai.”

  That does not mean
  history and politics have been disentangled. Early this year a
  prominent Chinese historian, Yuan Weishi, wrote an essay that
  criticized Chinese textbooks for whitewashing the savagery of the Boxer
  Rebellion, the violent movement against foreigners in China at the
  beginning of the 20th century. He called for a more balanced analysis
  of what provoked foreign interventions at the time.

  In response,
  the popular newspaper supplement Freezing Point, which carried his
  essay, was temporarily shut down and its editors were fired. When it
  reopened, Freezing Point ran an essay that rebuked Mr. Yuan, a warning
  that many historical topics remained too delicate to discuss in the
  popular media.

  The Shanghai textbook revisions do not address
  many domestic and foreign concerns about the biased way Chinese schools
  teach recent history. Like the old textbooks, for example, the new ones
  play down historic errors or atrocities like the Great Leap Forward,
  the Cultural Revolution and the army crackdown on peaceful
  pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989.

  The junior high school
  textbook still uses boilerplate idioms to condemn Japan’s invasion of
  China in the 1930’s and includes little about Tokyo’s peaceful,
  democratic postwar development. It will do little to assuage Japanese
  concerns that Chinese imbibe hatred of Japan from a young age.

  Yet
  over all, the reduction in time spent studying history and the
  inclusion of new topics, like culture and technology, mean that the
  content of the core Chinese history course has contracted sharply.

  The
  new textbook leaves out some milestones of ancient history. Shanghai
  students will no longer learn that Qin Shihuang, who unified the
  country and became China’s first emperor, ordered a campaign to burn
  books and kill scholars, to wipe out intellectual resistance to his
  rule. The text bypasses well-known rebellions and coups that shook or
  toppled the Zhou, Sui, Tang and Ming dynasties.

  It does not
  mention the resistance by Han Chinese, the country’s dominant ethnic
  group, to Kublai Khan’s invasion and the founding of the
  Mongol-controlled Yuan dynasty. Wen Tianxiang, a Han Chinese prime
  minister who became the country’s most transcendent symbol of loyalty
  and patriotism when he refused to serve the Mongol invaders, is also
  left out.

  Some of those historic facts and personalities have
  been replaced with references to old customs and fashions, prompting
  some critics to say that history teaching has lost focus.

  “Would
  you rather students remember the design of ancient robes, or that the
  Qin dynasty unified China in 221 B.C.?” one high school teacher quipped
  in an online forum for history experts.

  Others speculated that the Shanghai textbooks reflected the political viewpoints of China’s top leaders, including Jiang Zemin, the former president and Communist Party chief, and his successor, Hu Jintao.

  Mr.
  Jiang’s “Three Represents” slogan aimed to broaden the Communist
  Party’s mandate and dilute its traditional emphasis on class struggle.
  Mr. Hu coined the phrase “harmonious society,” which analysts say aims
  to persuade people to build a stable, prosperous, unified China under
  one-party rule.

  The new textbooks de-emphasize dynastic change,
  peasant struggle, ethnic rivalry and war, some critics say, because the
  leadership does not want people thinking that such things matter a
  great deal. Officials prefer to create the impression that Chinese
  through the ages cared more about innovation, technology and trade
  relationships with the outside world.

  Mr. Zhou, the Shanghai
  scholar who helped write the textbooks, says the new history does
  present a more harmonious image of China’s past. But he says the
  alterations “do not come from someone’s political slogan,” but rather
  reflect a sea change in thinking about what students need to know.

  “The
  government has a big role in approving textbooks,” he said. “But the
  goal of our work is not politics. It is to make the study of history
  more mainstream and prepare our students for a new era.”

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