ABSTRACT
Until the 20th century, history written in China served the interests of ruling groups. It focused on dynastic politics with one dynasty following another in a “cycle of ascent, achievement, decay, and rebirth under a new family.” This focus on dynasties continues to be at the core of most secondary school global history textbook coverage of China. The Library of Congress’s online Country Study of China (https://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field%28DOCID+ cn0012%29, accessed March 31, 2010), on the other hand, identifies important themes in Chinese history that illustrate many of the main ideas we want students to understand about global history. They include “the capacity of the Chinese to absorb the people of surrounding areas into their own civilization” through conquest, colonization, and assimilation. It attributes their success to China’s written language, the superiority of its technology and political institutions, its “artistic and intellectual creativity,” and the “sheer weight of their numbers.” Another recurrent theme in the history of China (as well as in the history of the Roman Empire and of pre-Columbian Meso-
In Chapters 4 and 6, I argued that in most cases the standard global history curriculum is the history of Western Europe and British North America (Western Civilization) with tangents. Imagine if the global history curriculum and textbooks were written by Chinese historians who placed China at the center of world events. Their global history would certainly look very different from the traditional global history taught in the United States, with different epochs, heroes, and tragedies, but it would not necessarily be any less, or more, valid. While the content information would definitely be different, teachers could introduce students to the same themes and address the same essential questions. At the end of every chapter in the textbooks focusing on China, there would probably be a section titled “Meanwhile in the Rest of the World.”
