Yan Fei on the changing portrayal of ‘minority nationalities’ in China’s history textbooks Asian Education Podcast

Continuing our series on ‘the politics of education on China’s periphery’, in this episode Ed and Gairan interview Yan Fei, who co-authored a paper for the Comparative Education special issue (60.1) on ‘shifting state policies and the curricular portrayal of China’s minority nationalities’. Dr. Yan has researched the changing depiction of non-Han groups in China’s history textbooks during the entirety of the period of Communist rule, since 1949. In this latest work, co-authored with Edward Vickers, he brings this story up-to-date by examining developments during the Xi Jinping era since 2012.

We begin our discussion by reviewing the earlier history of the curricular treatment of China’s non-Han ‘minorities’. One issue that emerges is the persistent salience of ‘class struggle’ and historical materialism in framing narratives of ‘minority’ history in the late 20th century, even after narratives of the broader Chinese past had begun to embrace (Han) ‘tradition’ and rehabilitate elite ‘patriots’ from China’s past. This reflects a longstanding CCP strategy of emphasising the economic and developmental benefits that ‘minorities’ have enjoyed as a result of Communist rule, and contrasting these with the ‘bad old days’ of pre-revolutionary rule by ‘ethnic’ elites.

However, as is also discussed in our interview with James Leibold and Tenjin Dorjee (Series Two, Episode Three), since the early 2000s there has been a significant shift in official policy on the teaching and portrayal of ‘minority’ cultures and languages. Unrest in Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009 fuelled anxiety over the loyalty of Tibetans and Uyghurs, and caused many Han officials and scholars to question a belief that economic development would gradually reconcile such groups to Chinese rule. This is the context for a tightening of various aspects of ‘minority’ policy, including the treatment of non-Han groups in the school curriculum.

2017 witnessed a major restructuring of the school curriculum and of the curriculum development process itself, reversing a process of decentralisation (albeit tentative and limited) that had been launched in 2001-2. This involved recentralising production of textbooks under the auspices of the People’s Education Press (PEP) in Beijing, as well as a significant tightening of the censorship process. PEP now publishes the history textbooks used in schools throughout China (with the exception of Hong Kong).

One question that arises here is the effectiveness of schooling and school textbooks in shaping popular understanding of the past, especially in an era of pervasive digital technology and widespread use of social media (especially amongst the young). Dr. Yan suggests that more research is needed into such matters. But in China, the extent of CCP control over social media and the internet means that information available through these sources may not significantly diverge from what is presented in school textbooks or public museums. If anything, social media discourse will tend to exaggerate or magnify nationalistic messages that are expressed more blandly in textbooks and other official sources. At the same time, the relationship between official historical and popular discourse is not simply one-way; to effectively shape or manipulate mainstream opinion (at least amongst educated, Han urbanites), the Party may need to work with the grain of folk memory.

Although the Xi era has witnessed significant changes in curricular content and the curriculum development process, has there been a real rupture with what came before? Fei suggests that what we have seen under Xi in many respects represents an intensification of trends already underway before 2012. He explains the talk (dating back to just before Xi’s accession to the leadership) of a need for a ‘second generation ethnic policy’. In the aftermath of the unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang, a number of Chinese commentat