Oops. I forgot to muse about Chinese history. . ..

I got so caught up in extolling the virtues of uttapams at Madras Cafe that I forgot to talk about Chinese history. One of Patita's friends who came w/ us to the cafe is a Chinese gal working for some media company. She mentioned how she often needs to find experts in the field of Chinese studies to get info and quotes.

She made an interesting comment which I have heard before from Japanese people as well, albeit in a different variation. She said that as a Chinese person, she felt funny asking non-Chinese scholars their expert opinion about China, and how odd it was that these non-Chinese people who speak Chinese w/ a "funny accent" should know more about Chinese history than Chinese people.

In the quasi-academic (I am not in academia, but via work and personal connections and interest, I sort of have my foot partially in this realm.) world which I inhabit, this is not so "odd". I am perfectly used to non-Chinese (i.e. caucasian) people knowing more Chinese history or literature than Chinese people, and likewise with Japanese history. In fact, considering that the history field is 90 percent male and 80 percent white (note: I may have these figures reversed, but the point is that an overwhelming majority is white and male) in the U.S., and not all of them studying western history, it means that there are a whole bunch of non-_______(pick any non-caucasian race) studying ________ history for a living, and therefore knows more about _______ history than the ________ people.

I'm not sure why this is so odd. In fact, I find it more odd that people find this odd. I do not mean any disrespect to her, but since I witness this similar why-does-this-foreigner-know-more-about-Japan mentality so often in Japan as well, I found myself immediately on the defensive and mentally rattling off reasons why it's not so odd for non-Chinese people to perhaps know more about Chinese history or even know more Chinese than the Chinese.

There are roughly 1.3 billion Chinese, of which--according to the CIA factbook--79.2 percent are over fifteen. Of this adult population, 90.1 percent are literate. Let's humor the CIA and trust that these stats are accurate. A quick plugging in of numbers in the calculator shows that 223,423,200 Chinese people are not literate. Would a Chinese person find it odd that a caucasian China specialist is likely to read and write Chinese better than 223 million Chinese people? Though it's not nec. the case that literacy and history knowlege are related, it's probably not too farfetched to suggest that many of these people don't have an adequate Chinese history background, either.

Nor is literacy necessarily a proof of history knowledge. Given the control that the communist government wields over the history curriulum--even today, and especially during the Cultural Revolution, I wonder how much information is withheld in history education. In fact, I just recently read an article about this in the Christian Science Monitor. The article talks about a book that challenges the the conventional wisdom of modern China's founding legend. One of the book's arguments is that the famous battle that occurred during the Long March did not actually occur. I'm not a China scholar, so cannot speak to the veracity of these claims (She interviews 40 people who claim that the battle never happened. 40 seems like a very small fraction of 200,000.), but the more interesting but not terribly surprising point I extracted from this article is that the official history that is taught in China has been rewritten and reinterpreted by the government according to their needs. For example, this article states that during the height of the Cultural Revolution, the gang of four rewrote Chinese history as a history of class struggles .

Another example of this is evident in the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre. During the Cultural Revolution, in order to maintain good relations with the Japanese, the government left this out of the history curriculm.

History being used as a political tool is certainly not endemic to China; I'm not trying to suggest that. Instead what I'm trying to suggest is that it is not so "odd" that caucasians who speak Chinese "with a funny accent" might know more Chinese history than the average Chinese person.