6 Countries that Edited History Textbooks

History plays an important role in defining the future of a nation and that’s the reason why special efforts are made to preserve historical stories so that they could be passed on to coming generations. In order to attain maximum benefits from them, sometimes the facts are modified to suit your national agenda. It might seem shocking but governments do use edited textbooks to promote these ideas. Following is a list of 6 instances when governments/individuals edited history textbooks to highlight certain false theories.

China

The Chinese authorities removed the details of a controversial movement, called the Cultural Revolution, from their history textbooks in 2018. This set of reforms was introduced by Mao Tse-tung, a Chinese leader who primarily wanted to regain his position as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. For this reason, he declared these reforms as an effort to realign China with the communist ideology (in 1966) and tried to achieve his ultimate goal through this movement. In the following 10 years, he held a series of civil disobedience acts and protests across the country until his death in 1976. At the time of editing, the Chinese government replaced this chapter of history with a developmental one in their textbooks.

Pakistan and India

Both of these countries have always had a disturbed relationship with each other. Understandably, the history textbooks of these countries adopt a biased approach and reveal only a skewed version of the past. Right from the reasons of partition in 1947 to the partition of Bangladesh (from Pakistan) in 1971, the claims of both these atomic powers are completely opposite. For instance, Pakistani textbooks suggest that the partition of Bangladesh was actually a conspiracy of Indians while Indian books are of the view that India only helped a group of freedom fighters.

Afghanistan

The education ministry of Afghanistan edited the history textbooks of the country in 2012 with the intentions of forming a unified nation. A lot of people are of the view that these revisions were done to bring Taliban and other armed groups closer to the government because the previous version of the history considered them as ‘bad people’. Some major topics that were excluded from the curriculum include the anti-Soviet resistance by the Taliban, the communist government of Afghanistan, and the violent civil war fought after the exit of the Soviet Union from the country.  

Japan

The rift between Japan and China (as well as Korea) is common knowledge and was initiated by the territorial disputes between these nations in the 20^th Century. The invasion of China and Korea during World War II worsened the situation as Japanese forces killed hundreds of thousands of people (1937 Nanjing Massacre) and forced almost 400,000 women into prostitution. According to the reports presented in 2017, the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact was responsible for altering the history textbooks in Japan. When asked about the claims that the Japanese authorities are removing controversial material from their history, the Director of the society (Hiromichi Moteki) mentioned that they are actually publishing accurate textbooks as the older versions were incorrect.  

Iraq

Saddam Hussein, a President of Iraq who held the office for nearly 24 years from July 1979 to April 2003, altered the history textbooks to promote the ideology of his Ba’ath Party. The modified version of the history of Iraq suggested that the country won the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and the Gulf War (1990-1991) but both these claims were not true. These changes proved fatal for Saddam’s government as the US-led coalition used these textbooks against him. Later on, all the information about Saddam and his party was removed from these historic books.

Taiwan

In 2013, the government of Taiwan launched a program to edit high school history textbooks and a team of professors was trusted with this job. The re-written version of Taiwan’s history was introduced in 2015. As soon as these books hit the schools, a series of massive protests was initiated across the country because the edits were a part of the long-term plan of reuniting Taiwan with China. One of the changes that clearly revealed the intentions of the authorities was the renaming of the Taiwanese Zheng dynasty to the Chinese-Taiwanese Ming Zheng dynasty. It was a massive twisting of the truth as Taiwan was never a part of the Ming dynasty because its tenure ranged from 1368 to 1644 (Taiwan became a part of China in 1683).