臺灣中學地理教科書的祖國想像(1949-1999)

Abstract

This article attempts to discuss the geographic textbooks of Taiwan, including junior and senior high schools, from 1949 to 1999. In 1949 the Kuomintang government was moved to Taiwan. From then on the Republic of China always claims that it represents the legitimate government of China, though it does not extend its jurisdiction over the Chinese mainland. Moreover, it denied recognizing any administrative arrangement by the Communist China. Thus, the introduction of mainland geography posed a serious problem to school education in Taiwan. This article analyzes the geographic textbook of Taiwanese middle school, which was compiled by the Ministry of Education during the second half of the twentieth centuries. The geographic textbooks used in Taiwan were satirized as looking like a ”historical geography” which describes the past geography of China before 1949. The state takes advantage of education to shape the national identification on the dimensions of time and space. The representative of the former is historic textbook, and the latter the geographic textbook. This paper tries to analyze the important issue of how the geographic textbook of Taiwanese middle school to describe, interpret the geography of ROC under the system of Mobilization and Anti-insurgent. It shows that the geographic textbook of Taiwanese middle school treats separately the ”construction” and ”politic” of the Communist China as a different issue. The geographic textbook introduced increasingly and moderately the constructions of the Communist China in Mainland, but ignored any changes of the provincial administrative division and boundary agreements with foreign countries. After 1987, Taiwanese people can visit Mainland China as travelers and find a geographic fact which is different from what the contents of geographical textbooks. Then the contents of geographical textbooks are forced to change, but the administrative division is still remaining the framework of the ROC in the 1940s.