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Feature: Critics slam schoolbook revision of Nanjing massacre

"The Nanjing massacre ... [is] not Chinese history; it's human history. And isn't history about finding out why events like that happened so we can learn how not to repeat them?"

an accounting student

High-school students will have more to "unlearn" than just titles and names after a new round of controversial history textbooks go to press.

In addition to referring to what previous textbooks termed "the mainland" as "China" and the "founding father" as "Sun Yat-sen" (孫中山) future high-school history books will only briefly mention the Nanjing massacre.

Also known as the "Rape of Nanjing," the massacre occurred in 1937 when Japanese troops sacked the city, killing and raping many civilians there.

Although the death toll is disputed among Japanese scholars, most historical records put the number of civilian casualties at 300,000.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the massacre.

Director of the ministry's Department of Secondary Education, Chen Yi-hsing (陳益興), told the Taipei Times that previous high-school history textbooks didn't cover the Nanjing massacre any more than the latest editions.

No significant changes to textbook coverage of the massacre at the high-school level have taken place, he said.

"Our practice is that if the incident was taught at junior-high level, then we don't go into great detail in covering it again at senior-high level," Chen said.

He added that all middle-school students were required to study the incident in depth and that if high-school teachers wanted to cover it beyond their textbooks, they could do so at their leisure.

"We respect our high-school teachers' expertise. If they want to expand on the incident, we respect that," Chen said, adding that teachers were more than welcome to use their own material.

Pan-blue camp politicians and education critics, however, panned the lack of in-depth discussion on the massacre and the introduction of language treating Taiwan and China as separate nations in new textbooks as the most insidious aspect of the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) "name-changing" campaign that has seen the word "China" stripped from the names of state-run companies.

Pan-blue camp lawmakers singled out Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) earlier this month for allegedly spearheading what they called the DPP's "brainwashing campaign," which in their view seeks to promote nationalism by literally rewriting history.

"This is an unconstitutional campaign to change the thinking not only of adults, but of children as well. This is a strategy to brainwash them, with Tu Cheng-sheng leading efforts to force DPP ideology onto our youth," People First Party (PFP) Legislator Lee Fu-tien (李復甸) said.

Angered by both name and textbook revisions, Pan-blue camp lawmakers vowed to call for a constitutional interpretation of the changes.

Four seniors from Taipei Municipal Nanhu High School, identifying themselves only by their surnames, told the Taipei Times that it "would feel strange if the Nanjing massacre didn't receive more attention in history class."

Chen (陳), 17, said she wanted "to be taught the facts" and that "students wouldn't be able to grasp history if certain events were erased" from the textbooks.

When asked why they thought the education ministry sought to change their history books, Min (閔), 17, said: "It's because the DPP is in power."

Rebutting recent statements by the National Institute of Compilation and Translation -- which writes and publishes textbooks for the ministry -- that previous history books didn't broach the massacre in more depth than the latest editions, a National Taiwan University student said that the massacre was covered extensively in her high-school history classes.

"I remember we studied it quite a bit," the accounting student said, identifying herself by her surname Chen (陳). "Look at World War II and the Holocaust. The Nanjing massacre is the same. It's not Chinese history; it's human history. And isn't history about finding out why events like that happened so we can learn how not to repeat them?"
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