Define a Dragon: China’s History Narratives in Contemporary Russian Textbooks as Usable Past

This article is dedicated to the ways China’s history is narrated in contemporary Russian world history textbooks. The study relies on the formal structural version of narrative analysis applied to all three series of textbooks included in the federal list of textbooks recommended for teaching world history in Russia’s secondary and high schools and aims at revealing the internal logic of China’s history narrative and its place in the overarching plot of world history narrative. The research findings show China’s history narrative presented in the Russian textbooks to considerably differ from that prevailing in the Chinese historiography and combine a relatively Eurocentric approach with projections of Russia’s own identity-related issues—technological vs. sociopolitical modernization, historical agency, and opportunities vs. risks of openness to the world. These results show how a foreign country’s history can be turned into a usable past not via shared experience or direct analogy but as an initially neutral material for addressing pivotal issues of one’s own country and ambivalent sides of its national identity.