June 23, 1999
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Why History Class in China
Focuses on 'National Shame'
By LESLIE CHANG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
SHANGHAI, China -- The past is alive and well in China, making things very difficult for its present-day leaders.
When North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombs destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade last month, killing three Chinese citizens, most people here refused to believe the incident was the accident Western allies said it was. Rather, the Chinese saw it as the latest in a long line of deliberate attacks on their country stretching back 150 years.
To understand this perspective, just go to school, where all Chinese children receive what teachers call an "education in national shame." It is a curriculum that has by all accounts been successful in molding a generation of young patriots -- so much so that China's leaders now find their hands tied as they seek to move beyond last month's events.
Even though this rapidly modernizing country is more open to the outside world than it has been for centuries, its history textbooks remain rife with the xenophobia of the 1960s when they were written. Communist Party leaders, like the Nationalists before them, have long stoked memories of humiliations by outsiders to help unite the vast country they ruled.
For any Chinese student, the NATO bombing was a textbook example of how foreigners have sought to bring down China -- from the 19th-century British opium traders who forced open Chinese ports with gunboats, to the "Japanese devils," in standard textbook parlance, who overran China during World War II.
'Loss of Self-Respect'
"The textbooks tell us that the history of modern China is that of people trying to oppress us," says Zhang Wenwen, a high-school junior relaxing on the concrete steps of one of Shanghai's most elite high schools after an exam for his political-education class. "Since 1840, we have experienced a loss of self-respect, and we can never get rid of this shadow."
Even before the Embassy bombing, the Chinese saw the Yugoslav war as an exercise in marginalizing China: The West changed the rules of the game by going through NATO instead of the United Nations Security Council, where China has a seat. Matters were only made worse after the bombing, when NATO gave what many here saw as a half-hearted apology, which mixed condolence with conviction that NATO had done nothing wrong. The event drew tens of thousands of students into the streets of China's major cities to hurl bottles and epithets at U.S. Embassy buildings.
Frozen Relations
Last week, Beijing rejected the results of a U.S. investigation into the missile attack, calling the explanation proffered by a U.S. envoy "by no means acceptable." A range of initiatives, from China's effort to join the World Trade Organization to military contacts between the two sides, have been frozen in the wake of the bombing.
Although many Chinese officials are anxious for relations to thaw, the public's emotions around the bombing are still high -- thanks in no small part to the very history of shame the state teaches so well.
Coaching in the catechism of shame starts early. A second-grade language textbook tells the story of a child cowherd who "led the Japanese devils into an ambush" during the Second World War; vocabulary words for the lesson include "murder," "sacrifice" and "Eighth Route Army." A primer recently issued to commemorate 50 years of Communist rule, "Ten Must-Knows for Elementary School Students," opens with the founding of Communist China built on "one hundred years of Chinese people opposing foreign aggression."
China Stands Up
As students move through the school system, these lessons are expanded on in history, language and political-education classes, but the main idea never wavers: Foreign imperialists brought China low, but now China is standing up.
Even in unembroidered form, modern Chinese history is a litany of ill-treatment and military defeat at the hands of the West. But events are twisted anyway to make sure lessons stick. From the opening shot of the First Opium War in 1839, blame for China's backwardness is laid at the feet of foreign powers.
An eighth-grade social-studies textbook opens this way: "Our motherland in history was once an advanced and great nation ... but after the invasions of the European and American capitalist Great Powers, a profound national crisis occurred." Less emphasis is given to the unwillingness of a hidebound imperial regime to adapt to the world beyond its borders.
In fact, some historians point out, compared with places such as India and Africa that were colonized outright, Chinese leaders did remarkably well in maintaining authority and retaining territorial integrity from the Qing Dynasty into the modern age. But events are forced into a framework of patriots vs. imperialists. The Taiping Rebellion, a mid-19th-century religious uprising that criticized imperial rule and left 20 million dead in its wake, is transfigured into "the largest peasant war in Chinese history," put down by "foreign and Chinese reactionary forces." The Boxer Rebellion, in which a turn-of-the-century xenophobic secret society killed missionaries and besieged foreign embassies, is celebrated as "the high point of the struggle to oppose imperialistic aggression." The destructiveness and strong antigovernment bent of both movements merit scant mention in textbooks.
"The education system of China has failed to teach our students the truth about modern history," says Zhu Xueqin, a professor at Shanghai University who says he uses textbooks, which are all issued by the government, as little as possible.
His son, Zhu Yuchen, a college junior studying philosophy and listening in on the conversation, cuts in: "On the contrary, the education system has fulfilled its purpose."
The tradition of rewriting Chinese history to bolster the ruling class is almost as old as Chinese history itself. As Confucius said, the first task of any government was "to rectify the names." In the imperial era, an early task of a new dynasty was to write the history of the one that came before, ensuring that facts were fashioned to boost the legitimacy of the new rulers. "History is a maiden, and you can dress her up however you wish," one Chinese saying goes.
History on Center Stage
For the Communists, history occupies center stage. The Museum of Revolutionary History sits on the east side of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the very seat of power. The opening salvo of the radical Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao Tsetung in 1966 against his enemies, was an attack on a play about a Ming Dynasty official who had dared to criticize his emperor. Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, revised the past once again in writing a definitive history of the revolution that blamed Mao for many mistakes.
Vituperation and bitterness continue to color historical teachings. Time and again, China's efforts to improve ties with Japan have floundered on memories of the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, in which Japanese troops killed as many as 300,000 Chinese. A visit by Chinese President Jiang Zemin to Tokyo last year, the first-ever such visit by a Chinese head of state, raised hopes that the two nations could leave that past behind. But the mission ended in failure after Japanese leaders declined to make a full written apology for the killings.
It isn't hard to see why many Chinese find it hard to put that bloody chapter to rest: At a memorial to victims of the massacre, a required field-trip site for all students in the city of Nanjing, from kindergarten through high school, the assessments are as brutal as the displays, which include human skulls and bones and Chinese army uniforms still stained with blood. A photo depicting the execution of Japanese war criminals bears the caption: "At last the butchers got the punishment they deserved."
'Japanese Devils Are Back'
Such teachings help keep anti-Japanese sentiment strong. At Zhejiang University in Hangzhou last month, students angry over the NATO bombing turned their rage against Japan when a Japanese student tore up a protest poster. Hundreds of students gathered outside the foreign student dormitories to shout anti-Japanese slogans. The event was widely discussed in Chinese Internet chat groups under banner headlines like "the Japanese devils are back."
Far from petering out as China opens up more to the outside world, patriotic fervor appears to be growing among the young, in part under the state's guiding hand. In 1994, the government issued a six-page directive outlining methods to update patriotic education and increase its relevance for today's youth. "Patriotic education shall run through the whole education process from kindergarten to university ... and must penetrate classroom teaching of all related subjects," it reads in part.
The government selected 100 "patriotic education bases," such as the Nanjing museum, around the country for schoolchildren to visit to learn of past humiliations. At the Zhou Enlai Memorial, one of six patriotic education bases in the city of Nanjing, children in the red neckerchiefs of the Communist Party's Young Pioneers swarm over exhibits detailing short-lived negotiations between the Communists and the Nationalists prior to the civil war of the late 1940s. "To learn our country's history is very important," says Lu Yao, an 11-year-old in pigtails who is on her second field trip here. The city has instituted rules requiring students to visit all of its six such sites three times before they graduate from high school.
Patriotism and Self-Respect
The efforts appear to be paying off. In a 1994 poll, young people ranked patriotism second in importance among a list of values, behind self-respect. Among workers, farmers and science students, patriotism came in first place, up from fifth a decade ago.
One reason the government is taking the lead in nurturing nationalism can be found, again, in history: Patriotic movements can turn against the state. In 1919, Chinese students protesting the terms of the Versailles Treaty -- which, among other things, handed German-controlled lands in China over to Japan -- denounced a government they saw as too weak to protect China's interests. Protesters called for democracy and modern ideas as the best way to save the nation. School textbooks dub the incident the "May 4 Patriotic Movement," excising any references to democracy. In reality, the movement gave birth to a Communist opposition that eventually overturned the regime.
While the West waits for China to get beyond its past, for most Chinese there is still a long way to go. Righting the wrongs of the past 150 years, they say, has only just begun, with the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997 and the return of the Portuguese colony of Macau later this year. Many Chinese feel their claims to other lands are undermined by foreign intervention; they blame the U.S. for encouraging Taiwan's separation from China and for fomenting independence sentiment in Tibet.
"With the gathering in of the Chinese lands and the undoing of the imperialist past, history will be at the front of people's minds," says Dorothea Martin, a historian at Appalachian State University in North Carolina who studies how Chinese leaders have created a world view through the writing of history. As a result, she says, the past and its burdens will continue to complicate China's ascendance on the world stage, long after the NATO bombing is just another chapter in a history textbook.
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