Relating History Education with National Identities on Modern State-Building: Korean and Chinese History Textbooks in Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

Despite the fact that both South Korea and China have similar past histories of being invaded and colonized by foreign powers, these two countries rarely have common acuities or shared recognition mechanisms. With this puzzling phenomenon, this study compares Korean and Chinese high school history textbooks to reveal their own national identities which are embedded and forged in the textbook discourses. It sets out to locate what Chinese and Korean governments national identities have echoed in history textbooks of senior high schools by investigating language use, employing ethnomethodology to shed light on the perception gap between the two countries. The perception gap between Korea and China, which has appeared in history textbooks, becomes a potential powerhouse producing various malaises of identity-based struggles stemming from organized delusions on each other.