Revision of history or of state propaganda or of CCP orthodoxy?

Where’s Mao? Chinese Revise History Books – New York Times

• Where’s Mao? Chinese Revise History Books By JOSEPH KAHN, Published: September 1, 2006 NY Times
  
• BEIJING, Aug. 31 — 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. Nearly overnight the country’s most prosperous schools have shelved the Marxist template that had dominated standard history texts since the 1950’s.
  
• 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 today’s economic and political goals. Supporterss say the overhaul enlivens mandatory history courses for junior and senior high school students and better prepares them for life in the real world. The old textbooks, not unlike the ruling Communist Party, changed relatively little in the last quarter-century of market-oriented economic reforms. They were glaringly out of sync with realities students face outside the classroom. But critics say the textbooks trade one political agenda for another. – post by robertg69

Thinking about my experience teaching in a primary school, a business English school and at an outsource software company in Dalian, PRC for about 10 months in 2005, I can say that I am not surprised that a small part of a very large state apparatus has approved this kind of radical change.

This large home-made panel turned up in the main entrance of the primary school I was employed by for about 8 months. Canada’s culture is discussed in this panel and my pic is in the upper right hand.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that my Chinese wife and many of the Chinese people I met in Dalian were and are more focused on fulfilling their personal dreams than on Chinese history as propaganda. The annual school cultural event focused on non-Chinese cultures starting with this major theme ‘borrowed’ from a John Denver CD. My first contact with it came via a music teacher who asked me to listen to the CD, on an inferior sound system, to give him a print version of the lyrics. It took me several visits to the Internet, at home in Dalian, to get the whole thing transliterated. I was amazed when step by step this became the first step in a major school event that took up many classroom hours and three major dress rehearsels at the school and in Dalian TV’s production studio.

My wife was born in Dalian in 1964 was in school during the Cultural Revolution. Her parents have been Communist Party members for most of their working lives. They are now well retired and live ordinary and modest lives. No grey money there!

I was amazed when my wife shared with me some of her own ideas about God instead of those of Mao or Zhou en Lai or any other Chinese historical figure. She amusingly dismissed the views of China’s political hierarchy as BS, but never said “lies”. On the other hand, I remember one 40some year old Chinese woman, (known to me as Summer) and fellow teacher in the TaoYuan Xiao Xue (Primary School), telling me,in a very solemn way, that Mao was the ONLY ‘leader’ who could have brought order to China in 1949. But she was one of the few to share this kind of a ‘political viewpoint’ in one on one conversation.

I stood more than once in the schoolyard for a celebratory flag raising and felt the hair stand a bit on the back of my neck as I heard Mandarin words intoned in what I expect were lots of CCP conventional wisdom about the benefits of a ’socialist state school’.

But what impressed me the most was the amount and quality of primary class time I saw spent on maths and computer classes.

I will add more thoughts here over the next few weeks.

I know it’s a faint hope but I would like to think that political leaders from that Gorilla neighbour of ours will pay more attention to ‘revisions’ happening in China and less on knee jerk neo-conservative rhetoric about the “threats from Communist China!