ABSTRACT
This chapter develops the regional analysis presented in the preceding chapter, focusing specifically on the case of China and its portrayal in school texts of significant foreign ‘Others’. It provides a historical overview of how official curriculum developers envisioned the teaching of world history in Chinese schools during the twentieth century. The various shifts in curricula design are analysed as clues to changing agendas of how to frame ‘the self ’ and ‘the other’ in the normative setting of school education and the cultural asymmetries expressed in these shifts. Special attention is paid to the depiction of Europe. This is taken up in more detail in a second section on current history textbooks, which analyses the various ways in which ‘Europe’ is framed by Chinese curriculum developers today, and what this might tell us about the official perspective on projects of regional integration in general, and East Asian regionalisation in particular.
