“ONE COUNTRY, TWO HISTORIES”: HOW PRC AND WESTERN NARRATIVES OF CHINA’S PRE-IMPERIAL AND IMPERIAL PAST DIVERGE

The 19th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress, held in October 2017, enshrined not just Xi Jinping's grip on power. It also re-coated its ideology with a medley of Socialist and traditionalist buzz words that had been marginalized in the 1980s. During the height of the reform era, these increasingly made way for ideas borrowed from market economies. Predictably enough, the ideological ferment surrounding the 19th Party Congress has since also played out in the realm of education. This article examines in detail the most current history textbooks used in PRC classrooms to construe China's pre-Imperial and Imperial past. To that end, included in my exploration will not just be changing PRC attitudes to the Chinese past, but also PRC instruction of world history from antiquity to the early modern era. In passing, I will also compare the school material with the latest authoritative Western scholarly studies of the same topics by way of eliciting how PRC official historical narratives of events preceding the 20th century diverge from Western ones.