By Mark Magnier in Beijing
When Li Xuanyao, a student at Beijing’s No 55 Middle School, wants to learn about the Great Leap Forward, she has her work cut out for her. Mao Zedong’s disastrous 1950s policy, which saw 30m Chinese die of starvation, is relegated to a few paragraphs in her 163-page history textbook.
The text blames bad central planning for its failure and is quick to add: “During the Great Leap Forward, every village in China built its commune. Members of the commune could eat in its dining hall free of charge.”
Although Xuanyao’s history teachers have taught her a lot about Japanese atrocities, she said, they are reluctant to talk about the Great Leap Forward. And they never mention the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
China has criticised Japan in recent weeks for whitewashing its militarist history, focusing on ajunior high school textbook recently approved by Tokyo. A wave of anti-Japanese protests swept the world’s most populous nation. However, a close look at China’s corresponding textbook, Chinese History – Textbook for Junior High School, finds several areas where China’s official history appears to have gaps of its own.
“Studying Chinese history is very important because it helps increase our knowledge and our patriotism,” said Xuanyao, 16, dressed in purple jeans and a matching backpack. “I wasn’t taught anything about Tiananmen [Square]. But what the Japanese did, particularly the Nanjing massacre, is unforgivable. Remembering this is very, very important for our national pride.”
Important it may be, but Sam Crane, Asian studies professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, says that what is being omitted is equally significant. “Yes, what Japan did in the second world war is horrible. But the embarrassing fact for the Communist party, and one that is not taught in Chinese schools, is that the party itself is responsible for many more deaths of Chinese people than those caused by Japanese militarism.”
Historians and China scholars say an underlying theme in many Chinese textbooks is the country’s victimisation at the hands of foreign powers, particularly the Japanese. Although this is true, they say, China tends to underplay the long periods that it dominated its neighbours.
The focus on being a victim can easily cause social indignation and the sort of emotional outpouring and violence seen in recent weeks, some argue. Japan’s foreign minister, Nobutaka Machimura, echoed this theme last month on a television talk-show, accusing Beijing of indoctrinating its students with an unbalanced – “our country is correct” – view of the past.
According to a survey released last month by Japan’s Asahi newspaper, more than 80 per cent of Japanese believe that China’s nationalistic education system encouraged recent protests in which Japan’s embassy and consulates were attacked, Japanese cars overturned and businesses vandalised.
In recent days Beijing has moved to quell the demonstrations. Last month officials detained 42 anti-Japanese protesters, some caught on security cameras hurling bottles, and paraded them on television in a warning to the nation. The government, apparently fearful that the protesters could turn their focus on it, wanted to prevent further disturbances before the historically significant May 1 and May 4 holidays.
In addition to ignoring the massacre around Tiananmen Square, China’s main junior high history text makes short work of most of the surrounding decade. Under chapter subheadings such as “Great Achievements of Socialist Construction”, the text skips from Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented policy after 1978 to the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997.
“These textbooks don’t make any sense,” said Jasper Becker, the author of Hungry Ghosts, about the Great Leap Forward. “All sorts of things are brushed under the carpet.”
Mao’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, a period of chaos marked by purges and the tyranny of the fanatical Red Guards, does merit a (five-page) chapter that concedes that Mao made a “wrong analysis of the class struggle”. But there is no reference to how China chooses its leaders, the 1951 occupation of Tibet or the exile of the Dalai Lama.
“Most Chinese end up believing the government view of history,” said Dugarjab Hotala, an ethnic Mongolian who grew up in China’s far west before emigrating to the US. “While a lot of students don’t take history seriously, unconsciously it becomes part of your thinking.”
