Teaching Difficult Knowledge of World War II through Chinese History Textbooks

• In Event: (Re)membering the History of World War II from the Asian Theater

Abstract

China’s experience and involvement in World War II are largely marginalized in dominant U.S. social studies curricula. Although China was a major Allied force and suffered the second-highest number of casualties, U.S. students’ knowledge of China’s experience remains limited. This study explores how Chinese curricular materials narrate China’s experience and the role of the U.S. in China during World War II. The guiding questions are: How do Chinese curricular materials (re)member World War II? What are the implications of these narratives for U.S. educators?
This study uses difficult knowledge and empire as the guiding framework. In education, difficult knowledge includes narratives of traumatic events that can cause learners’ cognitive and emotional discomfort (Britzman, 1998; Garrett, 2017; Zembylas, 2014). Warfare is a key form of difficult knowledge; however, through teaching it, educators can encourage students to challenge dominant narratives and reflect on the ethics of warfare (An, 2021). Therefore, this study views China’s experience during the war as challenging for both Chinese and U.S. students. In articulating the U.S. as an empire, Coloma (2013) argues that the U.S. engages in internal and external colonialisms. While U.S. internal colonialism subjugates people of color, its external colonialism justifies its ongoing expansion as a beacon of freedom and democracy. Coloma further suggests that using empire in conjunction with other theoretical frameworks can reveal the linkage between empire and education.
Four Chinese history textbooks, including two on Chinese history and two on world history, are examined. Published by the state-owned People’s Education Press, these textbooks are used across China and influence how history is taught for most Chinese students. Using critical content analysis (Short, 2017), I focus on how these textbooks describe the events leading up to, during, and after Japan’s invasion of China. I also pay attention to how they describe the role of the U.S. in these events.
These Chinese textbooks detail the suffering of Chinese people at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army. Using images and survivor testimonies, the textbooks highlight the brutality of the war and situate the war within the masternarrative of “Century of Humiliation” (Gries et al., 2011). At the same time, they also explain Chinese people’s collective resistance against the invaders, surfacing the agency of the Chinese and emphasizing their role in defeating Japan. In these narratives, the U.S. was an enabler of the war, benefiting from its onset and consequences while concealing its complicity beneath the rhetoric of freedom and democracy.
This study contributes to the broader discussions of how history education should be a site for confronting empire (Coloma, 2013) and acknowledging trauma (Zembylas, 2014). For U.S. educators, narratives from Chinese textbooks can serve as counternarratives to dominant U.S. history curricular narratives. As forms of difficult knowledge, they problematize the “heroic” depictions of the U.S. and invite students to confront the uncomfortable truth about imperialism and war (Bradley, 2016). Additionally, through portraying the U.S. as complicit in the war, these textbooks reveal how historical memory is constructed within ongoing geopolitical contexts.

Author

• Chenyu Li, Indiana University - South Bend