The growth of nationalism in mainland China, particularly among the young generation, is hard to miss. This presents a striking contrast to the young people in Hong Kong and Taiwan, who are more eager to embrace “Western values” such as democracy and individual freedom. Researchers have suggested that historical education played an important role in mobilizing popular support for the CCP.

So to dig into this more, I and Eddie Lin at University of Chicago analyzed the linguistic features of high school history textbooks used in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. We found that Mainland history textbooks use more quadgrams, have a higher adjective ratio overall, and a higher positive-to-negative phrase ratio in post-1949 content. Moreover, the ratio of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) entities to Kuomintang (KMT) entities is higher in mainland textbooks. By studying the textbooks before and after the curriculum reform, we also found that the positive-to-negative phrase ratio in post-1949 history content has registered a considerable increase over time in mainland textbooks.

I hope that these findings provide more context to the notion that history textbooks in mainland China are often associated with a more subjective narrative that evoke nationalistic sentiments among its readers.

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