Images Of Soviet Union In Taiwan Middle School History Textbooks (1949-1991)

In international relations, national image is crucial to one country, which reflects public’s overall assessment of the state itself, state actors and its results. National image can, to some extent, show the country’s comprehensive national strength. However, it is also a concept with strong subjectivity, therefore it is inevitable that it exist some differences with the real situation. National image presented to people in a country mainly through school education, and history textbooks is one of the most important channels.In recent years, national image study is one of the hot spots of the academic research, and image study in textbooks has a very important significance in understanding one country’s education socialization and people’s cognition of other countries’national image. Taiwan under the governance of Kuomintang government play a subtle role in international affairs because of its special status, the perception and construction of the Soviet Union image also exits difference due to its special status. Therefore, this study choose Taiwan middle school history textbooks to be the study object.Junior high school history textbook is the most wildly used textbook in Taiwan people during1949to1991, the description and construction on the image of the Soviet Union in these books can provide a relatively true reflection of Taiwan people’s cognition about the image of the Soviet Union. The study period is from1919to1991, during this75years, the Soviet Union’played an extremely important role in international relations, who made a major impact on the development of the international situation. The image of Soviet Union experienced an extraordinary evolution, from the revolutionary in the October Revolution and the world’s first proletarian regime, to the backbone of the war against Germany in World War II, then turned into the big brother in socialist camp who manipulated the Cold War, to the disintegration eventually. Investigate the Soviet Union’s complete political life can not only provide us a more complete understanding of the development path of the image of the Soviet Union in Taiwan middle school history textbooks, help us to restore a more comprehensive and concrete Soviet Union, but also more conducive to analysis the logic behind the Taiwan history textbooks description.The study will use literature analysis method, by sampling selected major historical events related to the Soviet Union within the relevant time period, to explore the intrinsic link between the changes in political entity relations and the textbook narrative discourse, explain how the image of the Soviet Union is portrayed, what is the internal logic of it, then use the theory of politics of textbook to analysis the writing politics of Taiwan middle school history textbook and summarize the specific characteristics about the Soviet Union image writing in them.