“Telling China’s story”: innovations in school history education in PRC in 2010–2020s.

Abstract

Innovations in school historical education allow not only to track changes in the educational and academic environment, but also to record new trends in the ideological and political sphere. The aim of the proposed article is to identify the main trends in school history teaching in China in 2010–2020s. This goal is specified in several tasks: to consider organizational and content innovations in the teaching of history in secondary schools, as well as to identify the specifics of these innovations in the context of the main trends in the political and academic life of the PRC in the 2010–2020s. The results of the study presented in the article were obtained by analyzing the original texts of history textbooks for junior and senior secondary schools, as well as educational standards in history. In addition, the texts of relevant speeches of Chinese leaders were involved. The leading trend in 2010–2020s. was the strengthening of ideological control and state regulation in the development and approval of teaching materials. The introduced conceptual innovations reflect the dynamics of ideological changes in modern Chinese society. The new ideological task set before the school history course was the dissemination of new ideologems by Xi Jinping, in particular, “confidence in culture” and “three leaps” in the history of the Chinese nation and the Sinification of Marxism. The reform of historical education undertaken by Xi Jinping is part of a large-scale ideological project initiated by him, aimed at strengthening China’s “discourse power’. Its core is an original vision of China’s own history, within which new dates and evaluations of historical events are introduced, and a new terminological apparatus is gradually introduced to describe them. And it is this renewed vision of its history that China is disseminating to its domestic audience through its education system.