How is citizens’ factual historical knowledge related to their national identity? With original data from a nationally representative survey experiment in China, we find that significantly more Chinese citizens overestimate rather than underestimate China’s objective historical achievements, and those who overestimate the achievements of ancient Chinese civilization have higher levels of national identity. To an even greater degree, citizens who underestimate Chinese historical achievements have lower levels of national identity. We also find that correcting misinformation can potentially affect individuals’ national identity, although the effects did not reach statistical significance, likely because the survey experiment was under-powered for interaction effects, and because our information treatment was brief and on a very limited number of questions. These findings shed light on the subtle relationships between historical knowledge, propaganda, and national identity, and suggest avenues for future research.

Research design and data Our survey experiment was embedded in the China Governance and Public Policy Survey and conducted in December 2016.5 The survey employed a random dialing telephone interviewing system and was based on a stratified three-stage probability proportion to size random sample design (with additional onsite Global Positioning System/Geographical Information System remote sensing sampling strategy) to draw representative samples of Chinese adults aged 18 and older in mainland China (excluding Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Macao). In the survey we asked four factual questions about the achievements of China’s ancient civilization, including the length of China’s written history, the relative size of China’s historical GDP in the world, China’s imperial examination system as the world’s first competitive civil service examination system, and the antiquity of the Great Wall relative to Egyptian pyramids (see Online Appendix 1 for question wording). The four questions respectively cover history, economy, governance, and physical/military constructions, and therefore represent a reasonable set of questions to measure factual knowledge of Chinese civilization within the constraint of space allocated to us in the nationally representative survey. The questions were in the “true or false” format, with half of the statements being true and the other half false. We also designed the questions in such a way that the respondents had equal chances of overestimating and underestimating China’s historical achievements. For example, the first history question asked whether the following statement is true: “The earliest written records in China indicate that Chinese history is at least 5000 years long.” Note that we explicitly state the criterion of written records, therefore the correct answer is “false.” Those who answered “true” overestimated the achievement of China’s ancient civilization. The second question asked whether China’s gross domestic product (GDP) was once the largest in the world. This is “true”6 and those who chose “false” underestimated China’s historical achievement. Similarly, an incorrect answer to the third and fourth questions, respectively, indicated an underestimate and an overestimate.7 Following the approach of Huang (2015) of measuring social misperceptions, we assign a score of “0” for each correct answer to the history questions, “1” to an answer that overestimates China’s historical achievement, and “−1” to an answer that underestimates Chinese history. The respondents’ total history scores are summed over the four questions: the higher the score, the more positive the perception of Chinese history. Note that we are interested in the respondents’ overall perceptions, not how many questions each of them answered correctly, thus an overestimating answer and an underestimating answer would neutralize each other in our measurement.8 A negative total score thus indicates that the respondent’s overall knowledge of Chinese history underestimates China’s historical achievements, whereas a positive score indicates an overall overestimate. After answering all history questions, the respondents were randomly assigned into a control group and a treatment group, and the latter was given correct answers to the four factual questions. We then measured all respondents’ national identity by asking them the extent to which they disagree or agree with the following statements (on a 0–10 scale): (1) “Overall China is better than other countries,” (2) “I am proud to be a Chinese,” (3) “Chinese culture is the best in the world,” and (4) “I would be a Chinese again even if I could choose to be a citizen of any country.” Our dependent variable is the sum of answers to these four questions, with a higher sum indicating a higher level of national identity.9 Table 1 reports the summary statistics. The mean national identity, 32.8 (out of a maximum of 40), indicates that the Chinese public generally has a high national identity. Table 1. Summary statistics. View larger version Our expectations are straightforward: Respondents with more positive perceptions of China’s objective historical achievements have a higher sense of national identity. In particular, those who overestimate China’s historical achievements should have stronger national identities than those with balanced knowledge of Chinese history, whereas those underestimating China’s historical achievements should have weaker national identities. More importantly, if myths about national historical achievements can increase individuals’ national identity, we expect that correcting misperceptions could dampen that identity.

Discussion and conclusion Does citizens’ factual knowledge about their country’s history and civilization influence their political attitudes? With unique data from a nationally representative survey in China, we find Chinese citizens tend to overestimate rather than underestimate China’s historical achievements, and those who overestimate the achievements of ancient Chinese civilization have higher levels of national identity. To an even greater degree, however, citizens who underestimate Chinese historical achievements have lower levels of national identity. We find that correcting overestimation can reduce individuals’ national identity, whereas correcting underestimation has the opposite effect. The correction effects, however, did not achieve statistical significance, as the size of our nationally representative sample was not large enough for estimation of interaction effects, and the information corrections were brief and limited in quantity, and so may be insufficient to significantly affect long-held national identity. Although our data cannot conclusively demonstrate causality, the findings suggest that history propaganda exaggerating China’s ancient civilization has a broad influence in China. At the same time, underestimation of Chinese history, though less prevalent than overestimation, may have a larger effect than propaganda. This is likely because even those who do not overestimate Chinese historical achievements already have a relatively high national identity, therefore propaganda faces a ceiling effect and cannot enhance it much further. But the results also suggest that the concept of “historical nihilism,” which is frequently dismissed as government-sponsored efforts to stifle dissent, may have some face validity. Our findings thus shed light on the nuances and subtlety of public opinion in China with regard to history and propaganda. We suggest a few directions for future research besides rigorously exploring causality. First and most obviously, future research should have a substantially larger sample size in order to more clearly detect the potential effects of correcting different kinds of misperceptions about history. Relatedly, future research should address whether longer and more persistent exposure to accurate and balanced historical information can change individuals’ national identity. Finally, historical knowledge is not just about national achievements, but also failures and disasters. How is individuals’ awareness of the dark side of their country’s history related to their national identity? Answering these questions will give us a more complete and accurate understanding of how history and knowledge about it influence national identity and other political attitudes.

Acknowledgements We thank the Editor; Youlang Zhang, Jidong Chen, Dan Chen, Robert Harmel, John Kennedy, Andrew Little, Anna Popkova, and Yuhua Wang; two anonymous reviewers; and conference participants at the 2017 APSA, 2018 SPSA, and 2018 ISA annual meetings for helpful comments and suggestions. Jun Hyeok Jang provided excellent research assistance.

Declaration of conflicting interest

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Supplemental material

The supplemental files are available at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/2053168018794352. The replication files are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/GJNJZE

Notes 1.

See, for example, General Secretary Xi Jinping’s report to the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/special/2017-11/03/c_136725942.htm (accessed 10 January 2018). 2.

See http://news.ifeng.com/a/20171108/53085975_0.shtml (last accessed 24 May 2018). 3.

In this article we will use “knowledge” and “perception” almost interchangeably: an incorrect perception such as an overestimate or an underestimate is equivalent to false knowledge. 4.

A related survey is the World History and Identity Survey of 2007–2008, which used relatively small university student samples from over 30 countries to measure their attitudes toward historical events and figures around the world (Zaromb et al., Forthcoming), rather than those from their own countries. 5.

China Governance and Public Policy Survey is a research project of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, USA; the survey was implemented by the Survey and Research Center for China Household Finance at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China. 6.

Maddison (2007) shows China’s GDP around 1820 was close to one-third of the world GDP, by far the largest in the world. 7.

The answer to the third question, whether China’s imperial examination is the world’s first meritocratic civil service exam system, is “true” (Chang, 1942; Encyclopedia Britannica, 2018). The last question, whether China’s Great Wall was built earlier than Egyptian pyramids, was “false” because the earliest Pyramids were built in 2600 BC whereas early segments of the Great Wall were built during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period (770–221 BC) (Wang, 2014). 8.

This measurement admittedly does not distinguish a respondent who answered all questions correctly from another who answered several questions incorrectly and the errors canceled each other out. But because we are primarily interested in whether a respondent’s perception of Chinese history was balanced overall, this is a useful measure. Future research can develop a more fine-grained measurement. 9.

The index has a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.779, indicating a reasonably high inter-item reliability. 10.

In addition to the survey experiment reported in the main text of the article, we also conducted a separate survey (without an experimental component) embedded in a different wave of the 2016 China Governance and Public Policy Survey. The results of that survey, shown in Online Appendix 2, are consistent with the results of the main study reported here. 11.

The effect size in power analysis is different from the directly estimated coefficients in the regression table. Instead, it is a standardized index designed to measure the relationship between explanatory and response variables (Kline, 2013). In our analysis of variance, the effect size refers to the proportion of variability explained by the key variables.

Carnegie Corporation of New York Grant

This publication was made possible (in part) by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.