ABSTRACT
Although academic interest in world history takes a distant second place to the interest in China’s own past among Chinese historians, world history is, nonetheless, an established field of historical study and is firmly entrenched in the secondary and postsecondary history curricula, a situation unmatched in the United States. Political interest in the writing of world history has been illustrated in the careers of some historians and in the impact of political campaigns on the production of world history materials and on shifting the emphasis of historical interpretations. Political interest has had an equally significant impact on altering the emphasis of historical interpretation in world history. The main task of Chinese historians in world history since the mid-1950s has been to trace revolutionary movements of modern world in such a way as to reveal the inevitable victory of socialism over capitalism and to depict the victory of the Chinese revolution as the logical outgrowth of this global revolutionary trend.
