"Point at One, Abuse Another"

The recent two decades have witnessed a developing historical debate between China and Japan. Standing in the center of this debate are different historical interpretations presented in textbooks. Both China and Japan seem to blame each other for promoting supposedly politically-biased historical education. This has become a growing problem causing wide concerns even internationally: on the one hand, there is an increasing debate about the supposed existence of "Anti-Japanese" education in China since the last decade of 20th century; on the other, many scholars from China, Japan and the Western world also criticize what they see as a distorted (or omitted) history of the war presented in Japanese textbooks. According to the "framing" theories introduced by scholars such as Foucault, Giltin, Gamson, and Modigliani in the late 20th century, history textbooks, just like media, could "organize the world" both for authors who wrote them and students who rely on them. There are many skills in framing history in textbooks and one of them is the skill of "pointing at one [to] abuse another." Using a specific technique to analyze the interplays between changing politics and educational narratives surrounding World War II (which began in China in 1937) in Chinese and Japanese middle school textbooks during a certain period: 1950-1990, the paper aims to discover the history of changing narratives about World War II in both Chinese and Japanese middle school history textbooks and how they interacted with politics over time.