The perception of democracy in Chinese modern textbooks – From Western democracy To Chinese model –

Textbooks are a suitable historical source for examining the values of a society and the context of a period. In modern East Asia, textbooks were essential texts for making modern nations or citizens according to the modernization project of the state and intellectuals. This paper focuses on textbooks during the Republican Era of China to analysis the changes in concepts of democracy at 1920s. The research would compare the contents of textbooks from Beiyang government and Nationalist government.<br/> Textbooks in the early 1920s, when the late years of Beiyang government were generally followed Western-style liberal democracy. They highlighted republicanism, constitutions, democracy, and parliament based on the principle of the popular sovereignty, and taught the importance of liberty, equality, rights, and duties. As for the political institutions, a presidental or parliamentary system under the constitution were considered the standard model of a democratic republic. However the ideals of democracy in the textbooks were nothing more than a formal description as they were far from the political reality disrupted by warlordism.<br/> On the other hand, the Nationalist Revolution and the establishment of Kuomintang government of Nanjing represented the beginning of the party-state dictatorships. The Kuomintang regime had made Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People the core ideology of education, thus strengthening the state’s control over education. This led to a considerable revision of textbook writing, which was rewritten to legitimize the revoultion and the rule of the Kuomintang.<br/> The textbooks of Three Principles of the People are a typical materials about Kuomintang’s perspectives on democracy and nation-builing model. Although they agreed on the necessity of democratic politics, but at the same time, were negative on individual freedom and equality and opposed to liberalism. Kuomintang also criticized Western-style liberal democracy for its failures and insisted on the need to development a new Chinese democratic model inspired by Sun Yat-sen’s political ideas which capitalized on Chinese historical experience. Furthermore, they argued that Nationalist Revolution(Guomin Geming) was indispensable for making fully democratic republic, thererby forming the self-contradictory logic of a good dictatorship for the sake of democracy.<br/> To summarize, the Kuomintang regime constructed own political theory to justify its one-party rule which was presented in the textbooks by rejecting Western liberal democracy under the name of revolution. Accordingly the perception of democracy in Chinese modern textbooks before and after the Nationalist Revolution could be defined as a transition from the following Western-style liberal democracy to searching Chinese-style democratic model. Finally, it is interesting to point out that rejecting of Western values and insisting Chinese characteristics has been repeated in contemporary Communist China very similarly.