New Chinese textbooks erase history

BEIJING — 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 1950s. Supporters say the overhaul enlivens mandatory history courses for junior and senior high school students and better prepares them for life in the real world. But critics say the textbooks trade one political agenda for another. They do not so much rewrite history as diminish it.

J.P. Morgan, Bill Gates, the New York Stock Exchange, the space shuttle and Japan's bullet train are all highlighted. Mao, the Long March, colonial oppression of China and the Rape of Nanjing are taught only in a compressed history curriculum in junior high.

"Our traditional version of history was focused on ideology and national identity," said Zhu Xueqin, a historian at Shanghai University. "The new history is less ideological, and that suits the political goals of today."

The changes are at least initially limited to Shanghai. That elite urban region has leeway to alter its curriculum and textbooks, and in the past it has introduced advances that the central government has instructed the rest of the country to follow.

Some speculate that the Shanghai textbooks reflected the political viewpoints of China's top leaders, including Jiang Zemin, the former president and Communist Party chief, and his successor, Hu Jintao.

Hu coined the phrase "harmonious society," which analysts say aims to persuade people to build a stable, prosperous, unified China under one-party rule. The new textbooks de-emphasize dynastic change, peasant struggle, ethnic rivalry and war, some critics say, because the leadership does not want people thinking that such things matter a great deal.