Following the election of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and the Democratic Progressive Party in January, Minister of Education Pan Wen-chung (潘文忠) on May 31 announced that the ministry would formally abolish changes to the Chinese, history, geography, civic studies and social sciences sections of the high-school curriculum guidelines announced by then-president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration in 2014.
The ministry would return to using either the 2008 or 2011 guidelines, Pan said, thereby closing the chapter on the dispute over changes to the high-school curriculum.
The then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government announced in 1999 that the writing and editing of high-school textbooks would be opened up to non-governmental groups, in a move away from state-compiled textbooks to an approval-based system. However, this turned the writing of textbooks into a potential area of conflict.
In 1997, a debate flared up over a junior-high school textbook entitled Understanding Taiwan. The ministry had revised the history curriculum, adding two units of Understanding Taiwan. The nearly 20 years of dispute over textbooks — from Understanding Taiwan to the recent amendments to the high-school history curriculum — demonstrate Taiwan’s progress on the road to the democratization and localization of society.
An important step in the dissemination of education, textbooks are a way of remembering the past and afford the power to interpret historical events. Last year’s student protests over proposed changes to the high-school curriculum may be viewed as the final act in a sometimes hidden, sometimes overt cultural and ideological conflict that has played out over the past 20 or so years.
Put simply, the 20-year struggle for dominance over school textbooks and national culture was a political battle played out along ethnic lines over two opposing historical viewpoints: Greater China versus a Taiwan-centric view of history.
Since the end of the 1990s when Understanding Taiwan first ignited the debate over school textbooks, the dispute was over ideas of democratization and localization, fought along ethnopolitical lines.
However, in recent years, the gradual emergence of the “China factor” has had a definite impact on the debate, shifting its focus from an internal ethnopolitical conflict to a wider debate on politics and cultural issues that bridge the Taiwan Strait.
Now, though, there is a new challenge facing those who wish to establish a Taiwan-centric identity: a nexus between a Greater China historical perspective and Chinese “united front” cultural organizations that are attempting to block a Taiwanese “cultural independence” from China.
As for the Greater China conception of history, the Ma administration’s adjustment of the curriculum was simply the first step on the road toward a hegemonic cultural “integration,” which is not only intended to counter Taiwan’s separate historical perspective from China, but more importantly, aims to construct a common “cross-strait historical perspective.”
To further this blueprint for unification, in 2011 the Society for Cross-strait Integration filmed a documentary entitled: 100 Years of China: Between Ignorance and Enlightenment. The objective of the film is to reawaken a common historical perspective shared by peoples on either side of the Taiwan Strait.
Aside from focusing on historical perspectives, advocates of a Greater China history have also proposed a multifaceted cultural and ideological cross-strait movement.
They have promoted the ideas of standardizing the two Romanization systems used in Taiwan and China, in addition to high schools on either side of the Strait using a common Chinese history textbook. They have even proposed adopting a shared Chinese literature syllabus, so that more than half the syllabus is identical between the two nations.
The idea is that the younger generation, on either side of the Strait, will then possess a shared memory based upon a common writing system and shared culture.
In 2009, the Ma administration proposed changing the way Chinese is taught in Taiwan, so that students could also write simplified Chinese. It also called for the two sides to coedit a “Chinese master dictionary” and, in the same year, at a cross-strait economic, trade and cultural forum in Changsha, Hunan Province, Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference chairman Jia Qinglin (賈慶林) elevated cross-strait cultural exchanges to the status of “cultural identification, ethnic identification and the revival of the Chinese nationality.”
Of all the different types of cross-strait communication and exchanges, the most direct format is the academic seminar. For instance, Taiwan’s Society for Cross-strait Integration, together with China’s Confucius Institute and Hong Kong’s China Review Agency, initiated a “seminar for the integration of cross-strait culture.”
The society also joined forces with the China Council for the Promotion of Cultural Development to convene a seminar on cross-strait military trust-building.
Established in 2011, the China Council for the Promotion of Cultural Development is an key “united front” cultural organization whose purpose is to “promote Chinese culture, strengthen national consciousness and push for unification with the ‘motherland.’”
Of the events that the council either promotes or participates in, a special emphasis is placed on active participation in Chinese diaspora events that promote unification with China and oppose Taiwanese independence.
Since many of its members have a background in the People’s Liberation Army, a suspicion of Chinese government interference hangs over the organization.
In general, those who advocate a Greater Chinese historical perspective are concerned with the “revival of the Chinese nation” and “unification,” and had hoped that Ma’s administration, during the period of China’s “peaceful rise,” would be able to push through the so-called “minor revisions” to Taiwan’s high-school curriculum. This way of thinking ran into conflict with the progressive democratization and localization of Taiwanese society.
From the perspective of the younger generation — who protested against the changes — perhaps they felt that what they were faced with was not a Greater Chinese concept of history, but a history — and a Constitution — that was completely alien to them, imported from abroad, which could not compete with a more intimate “Taiwanese experience.”
The collective voice of young Taiwanese was clear during the textbook dispute — and is backed up by statistics. As the “China factor” becomes more pronounced, local identity becomes stronger, and this is particularly evident among the young. We will have to wait and see how the forces of localism will guide and change the debate over culture in the months and years ahead.
Cheng Tsu-bang is an associate professor of sociology at Fo Guang University.
Translated by Edward Jones
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