(iPoster) Moralizing National Identity over Time: Chinese History Textbooks, 1950–2020

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics and History

Abstract

How does the moral content of national identity evolve across generations of historical storytelling? In many societies, national identity is learned not as a neutral category but through recurring judgments about what is admirable, shameful, and worth defending in the name of the national community. History textbooks are a uniquely institutionalized site of this process: they standardize historical narratives at scale, are encountered repeatedly in formative years, and thereby provide durable cues about collective boundaries, responsibilities, and aspirations. While scholarship on Chinese textbook nationalism has documented broad shifts in tone and themes across the Mao era, the reform era, and the post-2000 period, we still lack a systematic longitudinal account of how the moral architecture of textbook narratives reorganizes national identity over time. This paper addresses that gap by asking: How do textbooks moralize core narrative elements (crises, enemies, heroes, humiliation, and renewal), and how do five moral foundations—loyalty, authority, care, fairness, and purity—change in salience and expression across the 1950s–1970s, 1980s–1990s, and 2000s–2020s?

Theoretically, the paper integrates Moral Foundations Theory with insights from narrative psychology to specify a narrative–moral mechanism of identity formation. It conceptualizes national identity as a moralized social identity sustained by patterned configurations of intuitive moral concerns that are activated and organized through narrative form. Narrative devices such as threat, sacrifice, betrayal, protection, contamination, and redemption bundle moral meanings into historically grounded storylines, making some moral concerns more chronically accessible while downplaying others. This framework motivates testable questions about narrative–moral coupling: which moral foundations cluster around recurring narrative roles (e.g., heroes, victims, betrayers, protectors) and plot functions (e.g., crisis, mobilization, repair, renewal), and how those couplings shift as textbook storytelling reorders collective problems, responsibilities, and aspirations. The analysis also considers alternative possibilities, including moral layering (new themes added without displacing older ones) and moral stability (persistent foundations expressed through changing vocabularies).
Empirically, the project constructs a full-text corpus of Chinese junior-secondary history textbooks spanning 1950–2020 and employs a mixed-method design combining manual coding with computational text analysis. Using stratified sampling by period (5–10 lessons per stratum; paragraphs as the minimum unit), two coders annotate narrative structure/roles and moral foundations with a detailed codebook. For large-scale measurement, the study adopts C-MFD 2.0 (Cheng & Zhang 2023) and evaluates its suitability for textbook discourse through dictionary–human agreement tests, intercoder reliability checks, and robustness analyses using alternative term sets and thresholds. The analysis then estimates cross-period patterns in moral language, models moral–narrative co-occurrence, and visualizes coupling networks to trace how moral cues cluster around recurrent narrative elements of national identity.

The paper contributes to research at the intersection of politics and history in three ways. First, it shows how institutionalized historical narratives can recalibrate the moral terms through which national identity is learned and contested. Second, it offers a replicable approach for measuring moral meanings in standardized educational texts across long historical horizons. Third, it provides longitudinal evidence on how official historical storytelling updates the moral boundaries and obligations associated with national identity, informing debates on nation-building, historical memory, and identity formation.

Authors

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• Zhengpeng Zhao, Wuhan University (武汉大学)