Asia-Pacific News

Taiwan revises history textbook to show it's not part of China

Jan 29, 2007, 1:30 GMT

Taipei - Taiwan has revised its high-school history textbook to show that Taiwan is an independent country, not part of China, a newspaper reported Monday.

The China Times said that under the order of the Education Ministry, the title of the national history textbook for high school to be used after the winter vacation has been changed from 'National History' to 'China History.'

In this textbook, terms like 'our country,' 'this country' and 'the mainland' have been changed to 'China' to indicate Taiwan is not part of China, the daily said.

To distance itself from China, the textbook now uses neutral words to describe events in China's history, like describing the 1911 Wuhan Uprising that toppled the Manchu Dynasty as chishi (riot) instead of chiyi (justified uprising).

Another change is that the new textbook has condensed ancient Chinese history but included a part on Taiwan-China separation.

This part reads: 'Taiwan's future remains a big question mark. Will Taiwan independence bring war? How to protect Taiwan from being swallowed? How to maintain the status quo? How to deal with China? Taiwan people are frustrated.'

Some Taiwan teachers are opposed to the revisions in the high- school history textbook.

'In the compilation of the history textbook, there was strong political intervention from the government, and only one voice was allowed. This is control by the state machine,' the China Times quoted Wu Chan-liang, head of the History Department of the National Taiwan University, as saying.

Taiwan and China split in 1949 when the Chinese Nationalists lost the Chinese Civil War and fled to Taiwan to set up their government- in-exile.

Until the 1980s, the Taiwan government called itself the legitimate ruler of all of both Taiwan and China and dreamed of recovering the mainland.

Since Chen Shui-bian, an independence-leaning Taiwan native, won the presidential election in 2000, he has advocated Taiwan as a sovereignty country and not part of China.

In recent years Chen has taken many 'desinication' measures like removing the word 'China' from enterprise names and encouraging locals to speak more the Taiwan dialect, and less Mandarin Chinese.

China has been monitoring Taiwan's desinication and warned that it would recover Taiwan by force if Taiwan declares independence or takes concrete steps to achieve de facto independence.