Dissecting the Chinese national historical narrative A quantitative and qualitative analysis of ideological roles of women, ethnic minorities, and businesspeople in Chinese junior high school history textbooks

Understanding China’s state ideology is a crucial step toward gaining a better understanding China’s former, current, and future positions in the world. This study, therefore, traces ideological changes from the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 until today, what the relationship is between these changes and the social context surrounding them, and what implications these changes have for China’s present and future, most notably for the legitimation of the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Instead of direct party-state explanations or policy documents, these guiding questions will be answered by making use of Chinese high school history textbooks. National historical narratives across the globe are continuously (re)constructed to fit changing ideological needs, and in China history education is even openly admitted to being crucial for instilling correct values and patriotic spirit. In addition, telling the ‘history of the nation’ inevitably requires facing ideological challenges, which can be skillfully evaded in more direct theoretical descriptions, as stories about people, places, and events are shaped.
Using a unique and innovative combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, this study is the first to include a near-complete set of 43 Chinese history textbooks since 1949 with a combined length of over 2.3 million characters. This methodology and scope have enabled the visualization of general patterns of ideological change based on frequencies and ‘keyness values’ of ideological concepts.
The rest of the study further dissects the national historical narrative by looking at the changing ideological ‘roles’ of three groups of people as they continuously appear throughout the textbooks, namely women, ethnic minorities, and businesspeople. Their appearances in the history textbooks change along with changing ideological needs and requirements, and it is argued that the ratio in which they appear in these different roles matters ideologically. Visualizations of changing distributions can be insightful as ‘ideological fingerprints’ that add new understandings to Chinese state ideology. This study analyzes Chinese history textbooks in a more holistic manner than has ever been done before, in order to uncover broader patterns of ideological change in China.