Around East Asia, more sensible academics and policymakers recognise the risks of inflaming nationalist sentiment among schoolchildren. In China, where the practice is embedded, one scholar says that, given his country’s hyper-nationalist and xenophobic textbooks, he fears students growing up “drinking wolves’ milk”. To quieten down the howling, countries set up panels of academics to discuss the controversies. Japan and South Korea did so in 2002; China and Japan followed suit in 2006. The impulse is not dead: South Korea’s president recently proposed that her country, China and Japan write a joint textbook on the history of North-East Asia. But four years ago Chinese and Japanese professors abandoned attempts to come up with a unified interpretation of the past, and the recent spats are likely to make cross-country academic panels even less effective. And the new textbook conflicts are proxies for domestic political battles as much as for international rivalry.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 06:06:25 +0000
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