The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 8 | Issue 23 | Number 3 | Article ID 3371 | Jun 07, 2010

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Not Aesopian Enough: A Chinese Publishing Fable　　もう少しイソップ的に——中国での出版物語

James W. Loewen

Not Aesopian Enough: A ChinesePublishing Fable

James W. Loewen

In April 2008, Ma Wanli, a professor ofAmerican history at Nanchang HangkongUniversity in Nanchang, China, emailed me tointroduce himself as the translator of theChinese version of my U.S. best seller, Lies My

Teacher Told Me. He also invited me to write apreface for this new edition. I agreed.

Lies exposes seamy aspects of the U.S. past.The preface I wrote for the Chinese editionsuggests that a similar exposé might be usefulin China. As I wrote, I realized that saying thisin China might be problematic, but on behalf ofthe publisher, Central Chinese Compilation &Translation Press, one of the largest publishersin China, Ma Wanli assured me that my prefacewould not be censored. I finished the prefacein late fall, and the Chinese translation reachedme in December of 2008. My U.S. publisherhad it translated back into English and assuredme that my meaning had not been changed. Allseemed well.

In late spring 2009, however, the translatoremailed to request that I use “more Aesopianlanguage,” particularly in making points aboutthe individual’s relationship to the society. Ihad written:

What is the reason for schooling inChina? Surely it is to preparestudents to take their place insociety. To prepare them for a job,perhaps. To prepare them to begood citizens of China, surely.

But what is their job as goodcitizens of China? Surely it is: tobring into being the China of thefuture.

That job requires their bestthinking, their best research, theirbest judgment. What should China

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do next — regarding Tibet, forexample? Or about the one-partystate? ….

Aesop as depicted in the NurembergChronicle

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Chronicle) by Hartmann Schedel

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmann_Schedel) in 1493.

As well, I had quoted a twelfth-grade historyteacher at a secondary school in Shanghai,"The closer history gets to the present, themore political it becomes. So for things afterthe founding of the People's Republic, we onlyrequire students to know the basic facts, likewhat happened in what year, and we don'tstudy why." This quotation had alreadyappeared in the international edition of theNew York Times, where I had found it, but itposed a problem in my preface.

I responded by revising. I removed the word“party” and all references to Tibet, on which Iam far from expert, and made other changes,

some quite subtle. As I wrote the translator, “Ihave made those changes of my own free willand am still happy with the resulting essay. Ihope you are too.” I did not remove the Timesmaterial, pointing out that it was already “out,”so banishing it from my preface made littlesense. Ma Wanli cal led my revisions“magnanimous.” Nevertheless, at the end ofthe process, my book came out in China inNovember, 2009, without the preface, but withan afterword in which Ma Wanli spoke of his“sympathy” for the book and looked forward toits “translation spurring much self-criticismamong Chinese academic and educationcircles.”

I offer the forbidden preface to you, below. Youare the first to see what could not be publishedin China.

For two reasons, I am excited thatmy book is coming out in China. First, China is the most populousnation in the world, with a dynamiceconomy and growing politicalinfluence. As citizens of the world,Chinese people need both to knowUnited States history and to learnwhat Americans get wrong whenthey learn their own history. Second, I hope that the example ofLies My Teacher Told Me willmotivate Chinese scholars to writea similar book about China's ownhistory textbooks. The rest of thisintroduction develops these twopoints.

My experience of discussingUnited States history with Chinesepeople is limited to a handful ofgraduate students in sociology. They impressed me. They knewfar more about United Stateshistory than American studentsk n o w o f C h i n e s e h i s t o r y . Moreover, their understanding of

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U.S. history was not the sanitizednational ist version that weAmericans get in most high schoolhistory classes. It was critical,stressing the inequalities in oursocial class system and oursometimes imperial foreignpolicies.

Of course, these were students insociology who had chosen to cometo the U.S. for graduate study. Probably the typical high schoolgraduate in China who does not goon to college knows far less aboutU.S. history — although I suspects/he still knows more than theaverage American high schoolgraduate does about China.

Some readers of Lies My TeacherTold Me might ask, is i t notimportant to persuade foreignreaders that the U.S. has had agreat past? Should not U.S.writers claim that their nation hasalways done the right thing, or atleast, when it has erred, it did sowith the best of intentions? No, Iwould reply, Americans must facetheir h is tory as i t actual lyoccurred, and that is also how wemust present it to others.

The example of Nazi Germanyhelped to sharpen my thinking onthis matter. Would we wantGermany today to skim over thatpart of its past? To claim that theHolocaust — the intentional deathsof 6,000,000 Jews and 600,000Rom people — never happened, orwas an accident of war? Far betterfor Germany to face its past openlyand to present it to other peoplehonestly. What is appropriate forGermany has to be good for other

nations.

I would caution Chinese readers that Lies MyTeacher Told Me is not a complete history. Itssubtitle, "Everything Your American HistoryTextbook Got Wrong," is inaccurate. Lieshardly treats everything. Moreover, Liesemphasizes those topics left out or distorted inordinary high school textbooks — books thatemphasize those accomplishments of which theU.S. can justly be proud. I am proud that LiesMy Teacher Told Me has sold more than amillion copies, making it the best-selling bookby a living sociologist — proud that my countryhas embraced such searing criticism. CanChina do that?

Inaccurate nationalist history is hardly limitedto the United States, after all. While I wasresearching Lies My Teacher Told Me, I had anexperience that deepened my understanding ofnationalist history in other nations. I read ahistory of the modern world, focused on the"Western world" — Europe and the Americas —published in Moscow in about 1970. Most ofwhat it said about the U.S. was accurate. It dida particularly good job on our Civil War. Itsaccount of 1938-40, however — of the Hitler-Stalin pact and the relationship betweenGermany and the U.S.S.R. that led to WorldWar II — was completely opaque.

Perhaps every nation should outsource itshistory! Scholars in the U.S. could write a finehistory of the U.S.S.R., for example, just asRussians could do a good job on our past. Butabout their own past, especially when writingfor school children, authors tend to beethnocentric, nationalist, and sometimes justplain wrong.

Treatment of recent events is particularly likelyto be superficial. By definition, recent historyis controversial. Many Americans are still alivewho tried to end our war in Vietnam. Manyothers served in our armed forces and certainlydo not want to consider that their service may

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have been in a misguided cause. But authorsmust address such controversies. While it iseasier to give offense when writing about therecent past, it is also easier to do goodresearch, precisely because so many sourcesexist, including living people to be interviewed.

Not only in the U.S. do textbooks treat recenthistory particularly badly. Some Japanesehistory textbooks give biased and inaccurateaccounts of the years between 1905 and 1945,as historians in China and Korea have pointedout. Textbooks in Iran deny the Holocaust. Surely textbooks in China suffer from similardifficulties, especially about the twentiethcentury. According to a twelfth-grade historyteacher at a secondary school in Shanghai,"The closer history gets to the present, themore political it becomes. So for things afterthe founding of the People's Republic, we onlyrequire students to know the basic facts, likewhat happened in what year, and we don'tstudy why." As a result, according to a reportin the New York Times, "Most Chinese studentsfinish high school convinced that their countryhas fought wars only in self defense, neveraggressively or in conquest..." Similarly, manyChinese students believe that Japan lost WorldWar II largely as a result of Chinese resistancerather than the military defeats inflicted by theUnited States on the Japanese fleet and onJapanese forces on various islands of thePacific.1

What steps might Chinese scholars andteachers take to address this problem? Textbook revision would be one answer. However, I suspect it may be no easier to getChinese state bureaucrats to put out moreaccurate textbooks than to move privateAmerican publishing companies to do so. In2004, Ge Jianxiong, director of the Institute ofChinese Historical Geography at FudanUniversity in Shanghai and a veteran memberof official history textbook advisory committees,said, "Quite frankly, in China there are someareas, very sensitive subjects, where it is

impossible to tell people the truth."2 In 2006,Yuan Weishi, a prominent Chinese historian,inadvertently proved Ge's point. Yuan wrote anessay criticizing Chinese textbooks "forwhitewashing the savagery of the BoxerRebellion," according to another New YorkTimes story, and calling for a "more balanced"treatment. The Boxer Rebellion took placemore than a hundred years ago. Nevertheless,the government shut down Freezing Point, thenewspaper supplement that carried Yuan'sessay, and fired its editors. When it reopened,Freezing Point ran an essay rebuking Yuan.3

Incidents like these prompt Americans toconclude that China does not allow much self-criticism. If the bureaucrats who put outtextbooks do not write what really happened,then China needs its own edition of Lies MyTeacher Told Me: Everything Your ChineseHistory Textbook Got Wrong. If Chinesetextbooks do not supply an accurate treatmentof China's 1979 war with Vietnam, for example,or if they do not describe accurately the humansuffering and social disorganization thataccompanied Mao's "Great Leap Forward" — aswell as China's great achievements since theend of World War II — then an independentscholar must do so, or perhaps a group ofscholars. Feel free to use my book title, if youwish.

Such a solution — an independent book thatcontradicts, corrects, and amplifies what thetextbooks say — may actually provide a bettersolut ion than revis ing the textbooksthemselves. Consider a young studentconfronted by two different accounts of, forexample, the role of China, the United States,and the U.S.S.R. in defeating Japan in WorldWar II. Should she believe her textbook? It isthe "official" book, after all. Or should shebelieve Lies My Teacher Told Me: EverythingYour Chinese History Textbook Got Wrong? Itcomes with an array of footnotes, which thetextbook lacks. Suddenly she has to think. Which account seems more plausible?

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Maybe her teacher will give the class someguidance.4 Maybe the student will do someresearch on her own. Maybe a member of thecommunity who lived through the era can bepersuaded to speak to the class. The point is: now she has to do history. That is a muchbetter outcome than simply memorizing animproved textbook. As she thinks throughthings for herself, she develops her ability toread critically. This ability will help her aftershe graduates, perhaps more than the specificknowledge she learns in her history class.

What is the reason for schooling in China? Surely it is to prepare students to take theirplace in society. To prepare them for a job,perhaps. To prepare them to be good citizensof China, surely.

But what is their job as good citizens of China? Surely it is: to bring into being the China ofthe future.

That job requires their best thinking, their bestresearch, their best judgment. What shouldChina do next — about corruption, forexample? About the fact that the planet isrunning out of oil, just as China has grown richenough to demand its share? Or about the keysocial issue of next year — whatever that issuemay be?

To think about what China should do nextrequires Chinese citizens to understand whatcauses what. It requires citizens to readcritically, winnowing fact from opinion, andcoming to conclusions based on evidence. Inshort, this task requires precisely the sameskills involved in doing history.

Governments always think they know best whatto do next. Therefore they emphasizeeducation as socialization. In particular,governments think history should promoteallegiance among students. They are wrong.

To see the i r e r ror , we mus t make afundamental distinction between patriotism

and nationalism. Frederick Douglass, the greatblack leader in the U.S. in the nineteenthcentury, defined a nation's "true patriot" as one"who rebukes and does not excuse its sins." Anationalist, in contrast, is one who defends thenation as right, regardless of its actions. Surely China, like America, needs patriots, notnationalists.

Getting students to challenge the dogma taughtby textbooks about the past is the best way toproduce such patriots. That is why I wrote LiesMy Teacher Told Me: Everything YourAmerican History Textbook Got Wrong. I hopeyou will read it, not only to learn what weAmericans get wrong, but also as an example ofcritical historical writing that other countriesmight usefully imitate.

James W. Loewen is a sociologist who spenttwo years at the Smithsonian surveying twelveleading high school textbooks of Americanhistory only to find an embarrassing blend ofbland optimism, blind nationalism, and plainmisinformation, weighing in at an average of888 pages and almost five pounds. A best-selling author who wrote Lies My Teacher ToldMe: Everything Your High School HistoryT e x t b o o k G o t W r o n g(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743296281/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) and Lies Across America:What Our His tor ic S i tes Get Wrong(http://www.amazon.com/dp/074329629X/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20). An educator who attendedCarleton College, holds the Ph.D. in sociologyfrom Harvard University, and taught racerelations for twenty years at the University ofVermont. jloewen@uvm.edu

He wrote this article for The Asia-PacificJournal and for China Beat: Blogging How theEast is Read (http://www.thechinabeat.org/).

Recommended citation: James W. Loewen, "NotAesopian Enough: A Chinese Publishing Fable,"The Asia-Pacific Journal, 23-3-10, June 7th,

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2010.

Notes

1 Howard W. French, "China's Textbooks Twistand Omit His tory , " New York T imes( 1 2 / 6 / 2 0 0 4 ) , f o u n d h e r e(https://apjjf.org/query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A00E5DD1431F935A35751C1A9629C8B63).

2 Ibid.

3 Joseph Kahn, "Where's Mao? Chinese ReviseHistory Books," New York Times, 9/1/2006,f o u n d h e r e(https://apjjf.org/topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/joseph_kahn/index.html?inline=nyt per).

4 However, to expect Chinese teachers to teachagainst their textbooks is asking a lot of them. Teachers know that during the CulturalRevolution, from 1966 to 1976, gangs ofstudents beat teachers in the name of politicalcorrectness.

(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743296281/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20)

Click on the cover to order.

(http://www.amazon.com/dp/074329629X/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20)

Click on the cover to order.