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. ... 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. ... 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. ... 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.
wow but have they entirely ditched a marxist analysis of history from the article this isn't clear but implied this rather reinforces the view that following the cyclic analysis beloved of chinese historiography the communist party's domination of China is temporary and just the current dynasty in a sequence and the communist bureaucracy is the Chinese civil service of old only guided loosely by the principles of communism rather than Confusionism if you ditch the command economy (an economic model which Eric Hobsbawm argued Lenin borrowed from the war economy of First World War Germany) and ditch the marxist analysis of history hmmm that leaves the dictatorship of the proletariat but not much else after all ditch the marxist analysis of history and there's not a lot left of marxism just vague socialism good say I as a vague socialist ok now ditch totalitarism in way that the country doesn't disintergate, lead to gangsterism, mass starvation and civil war unfortunately the history of china suggests, on a repeating pattern, that the fall of dynasties leads in chinese deaths tolls in the millions Where’s Mao? Chinese Revise History Books - New York Times |