I posted this last week, got a few votes but no answers, trying again today.
I was reading "China Road", a book on modern China written by a...culturalist? Sociologist? I don't really know what you'd call him, but he's not really a historian by definition.
One of the points he makes about modern China is that they attach very little meaning to their own history compared to Europe, the Americas, or most other nations. The author hypothesizes that this is because so much of their modern history has been "embarrassing" - from the opium wars, to export of their cultural artifacts, to Japanese invasion, to Mao. "They simply peaked too soon", the author suggests, and it's been mostly downhill since. The result is (again, according to the author) that most modern Chinese know and care very little about their history, compared to the West.
I was just hoping that someone else could confirm this, and perhaps give some more detail about their impression of the author's hypothesis. The book itself is slightly out of date (2007) but I imagine this wouldn't really affect my question.
The author is wrong.
China if anything might be overly attached to its past, China's education program places a high degree of emphasis on its century of humiliation, of the opium war and the Japanese invasion, not as a matter of pride, but as a key legitimizing factor for the current Communist party. The narrative placed on Chinese history post 1840 is that the country was beset by weakness and bullied by unjust western and Japanese aggression. That this pattern of weakness was to continue until 1949, when the Communist party took power. The 1949 revolution is viewed as a redemption of the century of humiliation, as the moment when China became capable of taking on the west and as Mao declared in his speech proclaiming the founding of the people's republic, that the Chinese people have stood up. The rape of Nanjing is China's version of "never again" and is something which continues to serve as a focal of anger towards Japan. The obvious implication is that the CCP of today is the organization which will make sure that China will never be a victim of foreign aggression again.
China views its pre-1840 history with much nostalgia and a time when China was unparalleled in power and wealth in the world. The emphasis placed on the continuity of Chinese history from the supposed Hsia dynasty (which may or may not actually have existed) to modern day is a key part of Chinese national identity. The accomplishments of China such as the four great inventions (compass, gunpowder, paper, printing press) are repeated over and over again as proof of Chinese ingenuity and capacity for technological advancement.
The narrative of that does resonate with the Chinese people is that China was once great, it was brought down low during the 19th century, much of it because of bad Manchu rulers, and then by the failed experiments with republicanism and by more bad rulers like Yuan Shikai or the KMT in the first half of the 20th century, and now the Communist party is making China great again.
Phrasing it as "China doesn't care about its history and Chinese people don't know anything about it" is completely absurd. Chinese people (and especially the CCP) are obsessed with their history. The problem is that history isn't an open forum in China and there are "correct" official lines of it that are sometimes entirely fabricated or gross misrepresentations of fact. You could phrase that willingness to intentionally weaponize history as "not attaching meaning to history" since political utility overrides academic rigor but that sounds very misleading.