The Nanjing Massacre: official remembrance and history textbooks in the People’s Republic of China

Authors

  • Keith Crawford Edge Hill College of Higher Education
  • Shen Jingjing Nagoya University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21344/iartem.v1i1.802

Keywords:

textbooks, Identity, War textbooks, Nanjing, China, Japan, Textbook Research

Abstract

This paper analyses the manner in which the 1937 Nanjing massacre is presented and interpreted in Chinese history textbooks and teacher guides for high school pupils. The paper explores the manner in which the construction of a narrative discourse of historical memory in China is powerfully linked to contemporary notions of identity, patriotic and nationalist education in a
manner that reflects core ideological, political and social challenges inside China and in its relationships with its Asian neighbours. The paper discusses the notion of school textbooks as ideological discourses and analyses the pedagogical discourse of Chinese history education, this is placed within a context framed by the political and ideological construction of history education in China and the manner in which recent history teaching and public opinion in the People’s Republic has reacted to the publication of a history school textbook in Japan that questions claims of a massacre

Author Biographies

  • Keith Crawford, Edge Hill College of Higher Education

    Dr Keith Crawford is Reader in Education at Edge Hill College of Higher Education, UK where he co-ordinates courses on textbook analysis, educational politics and supervises docotral students. His research interests focus upon international school textbook analysis, particularly history and citizenship textbooks. Dr Crawford is Director of "TEXT", the Centre for Applied REsearch in Textbook Analysis based at Edge Hill College.

  • Shen Jingjing, Nagoya University

    Shen Jingjing is a Chinese national and resaerch in international education in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at Nagoya University, Japan. Her current research interests focu upon the expansion of higher education in China and, in particular, case study approaches to sociological investigation.

Downloads

Published

2007-08-16

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2007)

Section

Peer-reviewed research articles

License

Copyright (c) 2007 Keith Crawford, Shen Jingjing

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Content published in IARTEM e-journal is – unless otherwise is stated – licensed through Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 4.0. Content can be copied, distributed and disseminated in any medium or format under the following terms:

Attribution: You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

ShareAlike: If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

No additional restrictions: You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Notice: No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.

Authors who publish in IARTEM e-journal accept the following conditions:

Author(s) retains copyright to the article and give IARTEM e-journal rights to first publication while the article is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0. This license allows sharing the article for non-commercial purposes, as long as the author and first publishing place IARTEM e-journal are credited.

The author is free to publish and distribute the work/article after publication in IARTEM e-journal, as long as the journal is referred to as the first place of publication. Submissions that are under consideration for publication or accepted for publication in IARTEM e-journal cannot simultaneously be under consideration for publication in other journals, anthologies, monographs or the like. By submitting contributions, the author accepts that the contribution is published online in IARTEM e-journal.

How to Cite

Crawford, K., & Jingjing, S. (2007). The Nanjing Massacre: official remembrance and history textbooks in the People’s Republic of China. IARTEM E-Journal, 1(1), 1-24. https://doi.org/10.21344/iartem.v1i1.802