Why China Needs to Reform Its Global History Education
Comments by Chinese scholars about the Rio Olympics opening ceremony highlight a lack of understanding of the development of countries.
By Meng Zhongjie
During the two weeks of the Rio Olympics, Chinese media overflowed with stories about Brazil. But as the exoticism of the jungle-covered country mingled with the excitement of the international competition, many Chinese realized how little they actually knew about Brazil.
However, it wasn’t just everyday Chinese people who were scratching their heads — many intellectuals also remained uninformed. In the past couple of weeks there has been a mild furor in intellectual circles regarding the opening ceremony of the Rio Games.
Renowned culture scholar Xu Zidong criticized what he viewed as Brazil’s inability to accurately recount the country’s history through the Olympic opening ceremony since it didn’t reflect on the persecution of indigenous peoples by the Europeans. He also claimed the ceremony did not reflect on the current gap between rich and poor. In his view, by making environmental conservation the focus of the opening ceremony, Brazil was merely “following ideas that currently inform the universal values of the West.”
This argument was countered by Min Xuefei, a scholar of Portuguese literature, who condemned Xu’s assessment as being ignorant of Brazilian history since interracial mixing — not interracial conflict — is one of the defining features of Brazilian culture. “It is exactly from the perspective of being ‘Brazilian’ that the people of Brazil should be examined.”
He claimed that what we mean when we speak about “Brazilian culture” is actually “a tripartite form of Portuguese, indigenous, and black-African culture.” In addition, he said, conservation is a very real concern for modern Brazilians, and the opening ceremony “was categorically not a piece of nervous inaction performed before the world’s cameras but rather real politics in action, a serious commitment.” In general, all of the misunderstandings on show both before and after the ceremony only reflect “the dearth of knowledge each country has about the other.”
As a scholar of global history, I lean more toward Min Xuefei’s interpretation. It highlights important issues in contemporary China surrounding the teaching of world history.
Global history education in China typically ignores Brazil’s history and current circumstances. Modern diplomatic relations were established between the two countries in 1974, and in 1993 a strategic partnership was put in place. In 2013, this was upgraded to a full strategic partnership. Both countries are included in BRICS, an acronym referring to the developing nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
Despite these close ties, China has not seen an emergence of specialist Brazil history researchers, nor has there been a general history of Brazil written by a mainland Chinese scholar, with the exception of one book written by Lu Yinchun and Zhou Junnan. Though middle school textbooks in China do include some material on Brazil, it is never included on the national test syllabus and is consequently glossed over in class.
But it isn’t only Brazil that does not figure in the teaching of world history in China; other BRICS countries, like India and South Africa, are given the same treatment, to say nothing of smaller nations like Vietnam, Laos, and Mongolia. Russia is an exception because of its communist history.
Part of the reason contributing to this is our Eurocentric worldview. In the 19th century, a series of wars were waged between China and Western powers, which eventually ended in foreign nations occupying parts of China. The Zouding School Regulations, published in 1904, attempted to modernize the country’s school system. They sought to “demonstrate the current occupation of the East by Western powers and the critical situation among the countries of the East.” To better understand the countries occupying China, the history of the West fast became the central theme of the country’s world history education.
After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, influenced by the Soviet system, Chinese world history shifted its scope to include countries outside the United States and Europe. However, the focus was mostly on the independence campaigns of countries from imperialist powers and lacked a true understanding about these countries’ historical characteristics and different paths of development following their liberation.
This is an important reason why Xu Zidong, in his condemnation of the Rio Olympics opening ceremony, chose to lump Brazil into the Anglo-American narrative of racial conflict in the U.S. between natives, black-Africans, and immigrants. But a thornier issue is how China’s education system often eschews native history in favor of the histories of imperialist countries and regions.
World history education in China is evolving and becoming more comprehensive. However, from an overall perspective, much of the current narrative still leaves us lacking the means to organically integrate our own Chinese history into it, let alone explain how countries outside the European and American axis can benefit from our country’s historical experience, current knowledge, and expectations for the future.
Like Xu Zidong said, while on the one hand Brazil and other developing countries apparently “hold a diminished role in world cultures,” there are also people who worry that the modernization of these countries is still somehow unfinished, that their futures are undecided. How can we therefore possibly be enlightened by them?
World history education in China shows a “global mindset” when held up to many countries, but in examining the controversy over the opening ceremony in Rio, we can see that there is still a lot of room for improvement. If we want to firmly establish ourselves as a global superpower, it is important that we adjust our education system to better understand the developments of countries outside of the Eurocentric sphere.
(Header image: Sino View/VCG)
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