Laura Aitken-Burt asks our historian supporter Joseph Lawson about his research on China and Taiwan, the female activists and writers he highlights in his teaching and the different pressures facing teachers in the UK, China and New Zealand.
How did you become interested in Chinese history?
I took some great courses on Asian history when I did my undergraduate degree. They opened my eyes to the importance of that part of the world.
I also got really into kung fu and Hong Kong martial arts films around that time. After that, I wanted to see China for myself, so I went there to teach English and learn some Chinese.
I didn’t think I would stay very long or make a career out of it though. But I had a brilliant time, ended up staying for 4 years and deciding to do a PhD to learn more.
Did your translation of Mao Haijian’s history of the Opium War bring new female characters into English that had not been known from previous western histories?
I wish it had, but sadly no. Mao Haijian’s main interest is the question of how the emperor and top military and civilian officials made decisions and strategy during the war—and the top officials were all men.
A study of women in the households of these men and how they participated in and sustained the social networks that made up the Qing state would definitely be really worthwhile! But this hasn’t been written yet.
However, looking at the wider crisis of the mid-nineteenth century, to which the Opium War was connected, there were women leaders on the rebel side of the Taiping War such as Su Sanniang and Hong Xuanjiao.
Are women written out of traditional Chinese histories in similar ways as in Britain or are they represented in different ways?
Unfortunately, I would say that the situation is not massively different in traditional Chinese history writing.
Most traditional history writing in China focused on the appraisal of monarchs and ministers, so women were not central. But there are important exceptions.
Ban Zhao, who lived in the Han Dynasty was an early female historian who contributed to the Han Shu (Book of Han) and is extremely well known. And looking beyond formal historical writing, women in elite households read, wrote, and published in late imperial China.
History might not have been the genre they wrote most, but women are represented in the historical archive in a wider sense.
With its supposed focus on equality, has Communist philosophy in China promoted more female characters in stories told about the party’s rise to power?
I would say yes, but only up to a point. Revolutionary politics created more opportunities for women to participate in public life and as a result there are more widely-told stories about women from twentieth-century China than from earlier periods.
Figures such as Sun Weishi and Ding Ling are good examples of historical women who are well known in China today.
Many historians, including me, use Ding Ling’s writing in our teaching. Ha Jin’s book The Woman Back from Moscowabout Sun Weishi introduced her story to a broad Anglophone audience. At the same time, the party’s rhetoric about gender equality has never been fully matched by reality and many women who made major contributions to modern Chinese history still receive little attention in textbooks and public memory.
In the West, Jung Chang’s story of women in her family is extremely well known (my mum’s copy of Wild Swans was the first book I ever read about Chinese history, which isn’t unusual for people my age and older).
By the time she wrote the book, Chang hated Mao and the Communist Party. The book is banned in China, so whether we can attribute her success to Communism is debatable!
What are the curriculum pressures felt by teachers in China and Taiwan that you are finding in your current research?
My current research looks at teachers in China and Taiwan from the 1940s through to the 1980s.
During that time, both places were ruled by party-states. Since then, there has been a big divergence, with democratization in Taiwan. This means teachers there have more political freedom and more sensitive topics can be taught and studied.
There are some common pressures in both places: exam results are very important in both, so teachers are under a lot of pressure to prepare pupils to do well.
Did the ESIS History report tell you anything about the UK curriculum context which surprised you compared to the New Zealand one you were educated in or the Chinese one you have lived in?
I was surprised by the ESIS History report. I think university history departments generally do an okay job of including women in their curricula now, acknowledging that there are gaps and also that gender inequality can persist within those departments. So I was surprised at how the picture in the school curriculum is different.
New Zealand is an interesting case. Sometimes when looked on from outside, New Zealand seems much more progressive than it really is.
Many New Zealanders are proud that New Zealand was the first country where women could vote in national elections in 1893, so suffragists like Kate Sheppard come up in school curricula.
I remember learning about Whina Cooper, who spent her life leading Māori struggle for rights and redress for colonial injustices. I think there is more conversation in New Zealand about what should be in school history curricula.
For a long time colonization and Māori history weren’t really part of it, but there has been a major effort to change that. I think sometimes this inspires or enables a willingness to revise other aspects of the curriculum and include more women for example. But that’s not always the case.
In China, the possibilities for citizens to campaign to change what is taught in school are basically non-existent now, unfortunately. You can see traces of the state feminism from the socialist past. But even that is a problematic inheritance.
Unfortunately, for some people, state feminism of the Maoist era was tainted by other features of the Maoist era, like the violence of the Cultural Revolution. That association is unfair, but it is one of several things that makes it hard for people who would like to see curriculum change in schools.
Why do you think women are so often written out of the stories told about the past?
I think it is a general reflection of social biases and sexist preconceptions about what is important. Institutions can take a while to change and sometimes lag behind what, for example, teachers or children might want!
What inspired you to support the ESIS campaign?
I’ve always included women in my own teaching—you can’t understand societies in the past without understanding the work that women did. But more recently I’ve become alarmed at reports of rising misogyny in schools. It’s horrifying. Women and girls suffer most from this. It’s also bad for boys too, especially those who don’t conform to stereotypes about masculinity in misogynistic thinking. I think there has to be a multidimensional approach to dealing with it: making sure that the curriculum properly represents women is one important step.
What do you want to research for your next project?
I have a project about schoolteachers in the party-states in China and Taiwan from the 1940s through to the 1980s. It’s about their relationship with the party-state and local communities, and how those things changed with the rapid rise of women in teaching in both places from the 1950s and also with the political upheavals in both places that took place in that era.
I have been working on a book about this for a while now and need to finish it! If anyone would like to read about how the Nationalist party-state’s work with teachers facilitated the rise of women in politics in Taiwan (contrary to many Nationalist leaders’ aims and expectations), I have an open access article about this here.
