World history education in the PRC between textbooks and television - some observations on recent developments

History education has always been a crucial domain in citizen formation and the scholastic curriculum all over the world. Besides learning about one's own country's history, reflections on foreign history have been an integral part of this endeavor, although usually secondary to national history. The paper briefly outlines the developments in the curricular guidelines of the PRC concerning world history education and looks into some chosen recent world history textbooks as a practical \nreference. However, history education today is set in a pluri-medial context, and people are more and more influenced by history images provided by the mass media, namely television, as surveys have shown. It therefore seems imperative to contextualize school history education with media representations of history to gain a more realistic picture of historical consciousness formation in society. For world history, the example of the widely acclaimed Chinese TV documentary series Daguo jueqi 大国崛起 (The Rise of the Great Powers) (2006) is used to look into this more complex setting of history education in present-day China. Such influential media representations of history challenge also conventional history education in school to build up more critical competence to deal with these new and competing ways of history representations. As a practical consequence, this calls for more attention to the audio-visual and its specific workings besides the text (and textbook)-based conventional approach in history \neducation in school.