Date of Award

1-1-2012

Language

English

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School/Department

Department of Sociology

Content Description

1 online resource (iv, 35 pages)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Richard Lachmann

Committee Members

Richard Lachmann, Ronald Jacobs, Elizabeth Popp Berman

Keywords

Nationalism and education, Nationalism

Subject Categories

Sociology

Abstract

Chinese nationalism in official discourse is conspicuously reflected in CCP's territorial claims to Tibet and Taiwan, where local nationalism is challenging the official definition of China as a unitary multi-national country as the constitution describes. Conventional wisdom, utilized by political propaganda, is considering the contemporary Chinese national boundary as the legacy of "Chinese history", of which the popular version is deliberately depicted in public educational materials. This paper presents a qualitative content analysis of history textbook used in high school in China, showing the historical narratives, as a result of selection, about the Chinese nationhood boundary in ancient China, especially those regarding Tibet and Taiwan before twentieth century. Put into Brubaker's framework of nationhood categorization, the defining of ancient China in the textbook implicates two coexisting, while controversial logics: statist logic and Han culturalist nationalism. These two competing logics may serve as the ideological factor for the unresolved territorial and ethnicity issues.

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