An examination of the publication of junior secondary Chinese history textbooks in post-war Hong Kong (1950-2000) = 戰後香港初中中國歷史教科書出版研究 (1950-2000)

Abstract

After the defeat in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the Republic of China (ROC) government led by the Kuomintang (KMT) retreated to Taiwan. As a political strategy against the Chinese communists in mainland China, the KMT declared that ROC had legal sovereignty over the entire Chinese nation and Taiwan held the sole orthodoxy to Chinese culture. The ideology of "Chinese Consciousness" was then compelled on the Taiwanese people to fortify the legitimacy of its rule.

Under the Ministry of Education, the National Institute for Compilation and Translation (NICT) monopolized the compilation of textbooks in Taiwan. The history textbooks complied by NICT fully reflected the “orthodox China-centered” doctrine of history upheld by the KMT government. However, when the “Understanding Taiwan” curriculum was introduced in 1997, NICT adopted a completely different approach emphasizing Taiwanese identity. Such a phenomenon could be explained by the vigorous development of Taiwan studies after the lifting of martial law in 1987.

This thesis compares the narratological approaches of the Taiwan history textbooks and the Understanding Taiwan textbooks and critically examines their relationship to the scholarship of Taiwan studies at that time to explore how historical research and changes in domestic and international political climate affected historical education which shaped ideology and resulted in a rewriting of school textbooks of history. This will shed new light on our understanding of how national identity was reconstructed by academic authority and historical education in a given socio-political context.