September 9, 2006
China’s Revisionist History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:30 PM EST The New York Times last week reported that Shanghai’s new world-history textbooks for high school students have dropped wars, revolutions, and political history generally, but are heavy on “economics, technology, social customs and globalization.” There is only one mention of Mao, in a chapter on etiquette, only one sentence on Chinese Communism, and revolutionary socialism gets less attention than the information revolution. Mao, the Long March, the Rape of Nanjing, and other imperialist depredations are taught only in junior high school. There is no mention of coups, popular rebellions, or Chinese resistance to the Mongol conquest. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, formerly or nominally-Communist elites in Europe have generally played the nationalist card when ideological fervor waned, and for a couple of decades the Chinese Communist party seemed to be doing the same thing. Not any more. The Chinese Communist party may well be in the throes of a legitimacy crisis, but at least in Shanghai it is discarding the nationalist card rather than playing it. This suggests that the party is either very confident about its position—and thinks it does not need to bolster its legitimacy by invoking a vision of China humiliated until the Communists made her again respected—or possibly that the party is aware of the hazards of mobilizing xenophobic nationalism. A nationalist mood could make it hard for Chinese elites to back down during a crisis over Taiwan, or make compromises with the United States or Japan during a trade dispute difficult. Nationalism can be turned against an undemocratic regime, if it is accused of failing to defend the nation with sufficient vigor; that pattern is visible in contemporary Arab politics. Maybe the party is experimenting with the notion that China is ready to join a post-nationalist future, the one trumpeted, with imperfect conviction, by various European elites. What becomes of the teaching of national history if you are a post-nationalist? After all, a lot of history is about conflicts with other nations. A lot of political history is also about a heroic vision of national particularity, even uniqueness. Political history, and the history of wars and rebellions, requires enemies. If they want to damp down all the risks, the Chinese Communists cannot take the road endorsed by some American academics, and substitute for stories about duels with foreign foes a heroic story of conflicts with wicked reactionaries within the nation. After all, the party tried that one for over 50 years, during which time it presided over scores of millions of deaths. The lesson from Shanghai (and parts of Europe) seems to be that a history without heroes—and without enemies—may mean barely any history at all. A couple of days after reading this newspaper article, I attended a reunion of my father’s World War II infantry division. At the end of the dinner, a man with a luxuriant false moustache bounded to the front of the room shouting “Bully! Bully! Bully!” A couple of hundred people in their eighties recognized the act before I did—this was a Theodore Roosevelt impersonator. For more than a half hour, a lawyer who made a hobby of entertaining veterans’ groups did a more or less comic monologue in the person of Teddy Roosevelt, and as far as I could tell, the octogenarians got every joke and recognized every exaggerated mannerism. At the time, I wondered how many of my undergraduates would recognize a T.R. impersonator before the man identified himself—or even after. Then I wondered how many of my colleagues would recognize the references and mannerisms. Finally, I wondered how Chinese yet unborn will behave if asked to spend 65 days in a frozen forest, entangled with enemy armored divisions. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that if you want people to ever act like heroes, it is probably a good idea to give them some.
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