no WAY!
Where’s Mao? Chinese Revise History Books
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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