New Shanghai high school history texts

When high school students in Shanghai crack open 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.

Discussion of socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese communism before economic reform in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao Zedong 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 1950s. 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 current economic and political goals.

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

But the textbooks have provoked a lively debate among historians in advance of their full-scale introduction in the autumn term. Several Shanghai schools began using the texts on an experimental basis 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).

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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 just 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 both the junior high school text and the senior high school version, with emphasis on his economic vision.

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That does not mean that history and politics have been disentangled. Last spring, 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 had provoked foreign interventions at the time.

In response, the popular newspaper supplement that carried his essay, called Freezing Point, was temporarily shut down and its editors were fired. When it reopened, Freezing Point ran a new essay that rebuked Yuan, a warning that many historical topics remained too sensitive 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.

Both the new and old textbooks play down historical errors or atrocities like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the army crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy protesters in 1989.

The junior high school textbook still uses boilerplate idioms to condemn Japan's invasion of China in the 1930s 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.

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