orange dave

On the Please could some-one explain to me about ROC and PROC thread, Mikado and I had an argument about Taiwanese textbooks. I found a claim that they had been revised to reflect Japanese historical propaganda, though from a biased source. The Strait Scoop by Bevin Chu claims that there are textbook issues in Taiwan similar to those in Japan, seeking to justify Japan's WWII behavior. When I made this claim, Mikado responded

Going with this Holocaust analogy, you don't see any Israelis trying (sucessfully or not) to include Nazi propaganda in their textbooks, eight or even fifteen years ago. And the Taiwanese government has actually been relatively passive in their criticism of Japan, compared to China.

But, I did some more research, and I was able to find some more cites on this.

The Raw Story | "Rape of Nanking" vanishes from revised Taiwan history textbook
Radio Australia - News - Taiwan textbooks downplay Japan massacre
Xinhua - English

Interestingly, all of these other cites are from 2007, not 1999 - suggesting that there were two seperate incidents (?). Though this phenomenon appears credible to me, I'm still not understanding why, after a concerted search, I'm still finding only bits and snippets of this on the web. Can anybody help shed some more light on this issue? Why has this not been more publicized? It appears to have been subsumed in a larger cross-straights textbook issue at the time, but that still doesn't justify it.

Timeline issues notwithstanding, I'm still leaning towards our antiwar.com writer having the most sensible position on this issue.

mikado

Hi Dave, thanks for the research.

It looks like you might be on to something, but I would still like to know more about the context in which the books were (allegedly) changed. Looking around, I see the government made a number of textbook changes in 2007 to reduce the significance of (mainland) Chinese history and increase the significance of Taiwanese history in the curriculum. If that's the case, the Rape of Nanjing may be just one of a very large number of historical events that received less attention after the amendments. Whether that's a good thing or not is open to debate, but it's still not clear to me that the Taiwanese government was attempting to put a pro-Japan spin in its textbooks.

The comparison with the Nazis is nonsense of course - the Japanese were colonial overlords but they did not treat the Taiwanese even remotely as badly as the Nazis treated the Jews. If this Bevan Chu is looking for evidence of "Stockholm Syndrome" he might be better off wondering why over 50% of Taiwanese voted for a party that killed something like 20,000 Taiwanese during the "White Terror" 50 years ago (knowledge of that event also helps one understand why the Japanese are not seen as such a bad thing compared to Mainlanders by many Taiwanese).

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orange dave

I did in the course of my research find an editorial defending the changes, which said as much. http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-w.../09/2003348323

Curiously, it omitted any reference to the Nanjing omission, and it seemed to argue along the lines of "all history is political" that is used to justify revisionism in Japan.

The Japanese-Nazi analogy is a sound one...though you're right that Taiwan was not quite as affected as other places. But that still doesn't give them license to ignore events just a few hundred miles away from there..

mikado

This is off topic, but I'm curious. You're posting from PRC right? Is anonymouse accessible from the PRC? I'm very surprised the authorities haven't cottoned on to it.

Taipei Times is "deep green" and would defend just about anything the DPP does. To that extent, their editorials are only marginally more useful as a source of information than that nonsense by Bevan Chu.

History is extremely political in Taiwan. The KMT has spent half a century indoctrinating the Taiwanese against the Communists and about Taiwan's nature as an integral part of China. The DPP has spent the last 8 years trying to emphasise Taiwan's unique and independent character, and to expose past misdeeds of the KMT. Hence the DPP changing textbooks to reduce the impression that Taiwan is connected to the Mainland.

It may well be that the amendments to the text about Nanjing are just a very small part of the overall changes, hence why they don't seem to have attracted much attention in themselves. One source I read said that the history curriculum was being changed from three textbooks about Chinese history (which would have been 99.9% mainland history) to one about Chinese history and one about Taiwanese history. If the Mainland content of the curriculum has been halved then loads of events will be getting cursory attention, not just the Rape of Nanjing.

Still, any reduction of content about Nanjing gives the Blues and the PRC a nice stick to hit the DPP with.

Sorry, but it really isn't. The Japanese could behave like utter bastards to conquered peoples and POWs, but so far as I know they didn't try to exterminate an entire race in gas chambers.

That's a huge understatement. When the Japanese took over Taiwan they "pacified" the aboriginal tribes and some thousands of aboriginals died. That happened a generation before WWII (and was probably pretty popular with the Han Chinese on Taiwan). After then, Japanese rule was oppressive but reasonably fair. The Japanese constructed roads, developed industry and agriculture, provided schools and hospitals, etc. Rather than compare the Japanese in Taiwan with the Nazis you should be comparing with the Raj.

We're talking about a school history curriculum - it's neither necessary nor even possible to cover everything in detail. I bet you could go through the UK or US history curricula and find all sorts of things missing. To know whether the Taiwanese curriculum does justice to the Japanese war in China we'd need to see the whole of the text I think, or at least a decent review from someone not mired in Blue/Green politics.

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orange dave

You're making me work...I would like to find out more about this, but I don't know when I'll have the time.

Exactly what were they intending to do then in Nanjing, or with their civilian biological warfare in Ningbo?

They didn't really get a foothold on the entire Chinese race, but their actions were no less deliberate than the Nazis.

By the way, earlier when I was referring to the victims of Nazis, I meant the ROC, in mainland China at the time, not Taiwan itself. Though I can't prove this, I suspect the present link to Japan has to do with the ROC's traitorous streak during WWII, not Japanese colonialism on Taiwan itself. Once such alliances are formed in Confucian Asia, they can never be broken.

The "Great Firewall" was never meant to be completely airproof...otherwise how would people know what's going on in the world?

Even Wikipedia has been accessible of late - maybe this has something do with the Olympics?

mikado

They were attempting to kill large numbers of civilians, just as the US did at Hiroshima, the Germans with the Blitz, the Brits at Dresden, etc. That's not the same as seeking the extermination of a race (unless you feel the Brits were genocidal against the Germans, or the US genocidal against the Japanese?)

The actions of the Japanese were obscene, but if they'd wanted to exterminate Chinese they'd half a century to do so in Taiwan, and didn't.

One can find comparable levels of cruelty and disregard for human life in the record of the KMT - both prewar in China and post-war in Taiwan. And in the record of the CCP of course. I think that Mao and Jiang between them were the biggest killers of the C20th.

By "ROC" do you mean the KMT? Once upon a time the two were one, but nowadays the KMT is just one party functioning in the ROC. The point is that not all Taiwanese are KMT supporters, and only a minority of Taiwanese are from post-WWII KMT immigration, so it does not automatically follow that Taiwanese should identify with Mainlanders. Just as, for example, Brits do not necessarily identify with Americans, and vice versa.

What do you mean by the "ROC's traitorous streak during WWII"?

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