World-building Mao’s China — The importance of maps

This blog is a long-delayed successor to my previous posts responding to Mike Hill’s excellent work on the concept of world-building. Those blogs are available here, and here.

If you follow me on twitter, you’ll know that one of my top topics to tweet about relates to Chinese history, especially the period between 1949 and 1976 that coincides with the period of rule of Mao Zedong. For new A-level students, the topic always poses a challenge, for many reasons. In particular, their limited prior knowledge is a real barrier. Whereas students can approach a topic like Nazi Germany, or even Communist Russia, with a modicum of familiarity, this is often not the case with China. Students tend to be lacking in knowledge in the following areas:

· Knowledge of who the key people are in the story of Communist China, beyond Mao (indeed, even the names of the people themselves seem difficult to remember).

· Knowledge of the significance of China’s geography for its history.

· Knowledge of the history of China before 1949 and some of the key events within this.

· Knowledge of the ‘direction of travel’ of the unit.

· Knowledge of Communism as a political, economic and social system.

For teachers, our difficulties are further compounded by the fact that this topic does not have a tradition of great A-level textbook writing in the way that topics like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia or even Fascist Italy do. I would also contend, as I did in a post for the China Institute at SOAS Blog, that the specifications themselves are not laid out terribly helpfully, and unless you know what you are doing as a teacher can lead to persistent problems in understanding for yourself and the students.

Depending on my stamina, this may turn in to a series of posts about how I try to plug these gaps to give students a fighting chance of making sense of this unit, but this post is going to focus on how I deal with the problem of geography, and how I use maps pretty regularly to try to sort this out.

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I love using maps. My students often complain that it seems like I am teaching them geography from time to time because I love busting out a map at every available opportunity. [This probably dates back to when I was a small child, and I used to be stuck in the back of my parents’ car going on long drives from Inverurie in the north-east of Scotland, either down to my grandparents’ in Dewsbury or Derby, or on holidays into Europe where we’d always drive and get the ferry. I used to enjoy looking at the various maps my dad had in the car in the days before sat-nav to see where we were going and plot the route out.] For teaching the history of modern China, maps are, in my view, an essential teaching tool.

The first one I showed during my induction sessions for the current A-level cohort was this one.

This is just a simple relief map of China with key cities identified. But some key points can immediately be elucidated. For starters, there is a clear West-East divided in the country. The East of the country is where you have more promising land and, obviously, way more cities. The West looks much more inhospitable, dominated as it is by the plateau of Tibet and numerous mountain ranges, including the Himalayas. Of course, it’s also important to note that the source of the two main rivers, the Yellow and Yangzi rivers, which for centuries were the lifeblood of the country, are located in Tibet!

This is then further corroborated by the population density map below.

In many respects, some analogies can be drawn between China’s West, and the American West. The idea of the ‘frontier’, while clearly problematic in all sorts of respects, can be useful in helping students to see parallels between a topic they’ve studied before and this new content. Xinjiang and Tibet have only, more recently (by more recently, I mean within the last couple of hundred years or so given the vast sweep of history that China has), been clearly brought under control of the PRC regime. These areas are obviously very remote from Beijing, but there have been serious attempts to reduce that through all sorts of methods, often highly controversial (if we’re being generous).

These two maps further develop the idea of China as an ethnically and religiously diverse country. I think its’ very easy for westerners (especially young ones) with very limited to no knowledge of China to see it as highly homogenous in these areas. Yet that clearly is not the case. While the ethnic Han population dominant, and are being sent out to the periphery in some cases to put pressure on the ethnic minority populations and essentially colonise these regions, there is significant diversity, not along with the Tibetan Buddhist and Xinjiang Muslim populations, but also with Koreans and Mongolians as well as various groups in the South (where you also have the Cantonese language being spoken).

Crucial to understanding modern Chinese history is to appreciate its’ relationships with the outside world. Of course, one of China’s most iconic landmarks is the Great Wall, and it can be useful to show where this is located to students, as below.

This was built way back in China’s ancient history (which I am not especially au fait on at all), and then was developed by the Ming Dynasty to try and deal with outside threats from the likes of the Mongols and the Manchus.

More recently, of course, China was challenged by the Western powers, and endured its’ ‘Century of Humiliation’ between 1839 and 1949.

This period is, in my view, utterly critical to understanding so much of what happens under the Communists. China was essentially defiled by outsiders, which created a huge crisis for the ruling elites. In addition, it also explains decisions made by China during events such as the Korean War and the Sino-Soviet Split. The Communist Party itself, of course, was founded 100 years ago in the French concession in Shanghai — the most well-known of the ‘Treaty Ports’ brought about by the so-called ‘unequal treaties’ China was forced to sign with the western powers.

In particular, during that early period of Communist rule in the 1950s, it’s important that students see China as being, in its own mind, surrounded, by hostile powers. South Korea, Japan (under US occupation), Taiwan, Hong Kong (under British control), the Phillippines (independent from 1946 but with significant US military bases located there), French Indochina, and even Australia further to the South. You also have very strained relations with India, and of course with its Communist ‘big brother’, the Soviet Union from the late-1950s onwards. China’s sense of itself as being in a hostile or tense relationship with most of its’ immediate neighbours, along with the disastrous legacy of the century of humiliation, is critical to understanding the conduct of China’s international relations even today.

This, clearly, only scratches the surface of the work that needs to be done to world-build modern China. This does not yet give us a mental model of what it was like on the ground, both in the cities and in the countryside (another critical division in Chinese history) during the traumatic events of the 1950s and 1960s, and when I circle back to this I’ll see if I’ve got anything intelligent to say about that!