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China: at war with its history

The Chinese leadership refused to commemorate this year’s centenary of the overthrow of the last imperial dynasty. Obsessed with survival, will it allow challenges to its version of the past? Plus, a former Red Guard writes of new fears

by Isabel Hilton / September 21, 2011 / Leave a comment
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Published in October 2011 issue of Prospect Magazine

A propaganda poster showing Mao Zedong with peasants during the Cultural Revolution. Discussion of his role in history is still banned


I was having dinner recently in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou when the conversation took a dark turn. A Chinese think tank director was talking about his doctoral thesis, written in the early 1980s, on the Cultural Revolution. The party archives still hold many documents that remain “sensitive,” in the official euphemism. The extent of cannibalism in the Cultural Revolution is something he had discovered during his research.

The documents included, the director claimed, a manual on how to kill, butcher and eat human beings. A younger guest pulled a horrified face; a veteran journalist noticed his response. “When you’re desperate,” the journalist said, “you will do anything.” He began to elaborate, then shook his head and, saying “I don’t want to talk about those things,” left the table.

History has always mattered in China, a country whose rulers have struggled to unite its many different ethnic groups and widely divergent languages, but whose modern borders date back only a few hundred years. In the 19th century, China trawled its past for reasons for its decline. Since 1949, the Communist party has deployed its version of that history to rule out democracy and consolidate the building of a modern nation. In 1989, after the bloody suppression of the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, party strategists declared history to be a matter of national security.

Most striking this year, perhaps, is that the centenary of 1911, which marked the end of over 2,000 years of China’s imperial system, has gone largely uncelebrated. The party preferred to remember its own 90th birthday in July, perhaps unwilling to remind people that what the 1911 revolutionaries embraced were not the ideas of Karl Marx but democracy. Those who advocate the same values have had a hard time this year, be they eminent artists like Ai Weiwei, arrested in April and held for 81 days under tax investigation, or the human rights lawyers who have been harassed, detained or who have disappeared, or just friends and family of the Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo, himself a political prisoner. There is little appetite at the top to remind people of the fierce political debates of a hundred years ago.

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Comments

  1. GM williams
    October 4, 2011 at 19:39
    One fairly good reason for not celebrating the centenary of the overthrow of the dynasty in 2011 is that the event happened in 1912, following a revolt that began in October 1911. Another is that it was a dismally bad revolution, neatly satirised by one of China’s most famous writers in The True Story of Ah Q. It led on in a few years to warlordism and general misery. The failure to mention warlordism here is a remarkable omission. This plus the failure of Chiang Kai-Shek to stand up to Japan were the main reasons power passed to the Communists.
  2. Sept.In.Junct
    August 9, 2012 at 21:49
    So many murders and none brought to trial, how can the world even begin to trust such cruel enforced erasure of history and human lives?
  3. Fran
    September 26, 2012 at 16:01
    These are two fine reports by Hilton and Shen. Both modern and premodern history have been severely distorted by the Chinese Communist Party in order to conform to its own scheme for an endless monopoly over the Chinese state, and all the power and wealth that this situation grants to Party members. Xenophobia, cyncism, a money-first attitude, cover-ups of huge Party mistakes and crimes such as the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward Famine, and a system built upon lies and half-truths are what you notice when looking carefully into PRC history.
  4. Cannibalism in China « Understanding China, One Blog at a Time
    January 20, 2013 at 16:56
    [...] http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/china-history-cultural-revolution/ Like this:LikeBe the first to like this. [...]
  5. Supragenius
    February 14, 2013 at 15:32
    One has to remember that much of Chinese history, as written in the Western countries, is heavily distorted by propaganda efforts, that is, outright lies and extreme exaggerations. This article repeats a lot of these cliches of propaganda, without any references whatsoever to any kind of evidence.
  6. jixiang
    July 1, 2015 at 16:22
    "The moment our recent history is opened up to objective scrutiny will be the moment of democratisation for China, but it will probably also be one of great chaos." Shows you how crucial it is for the government to stop any genuine free debate about the country's history.

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Isabel Hilton
Isabel Hilton is editor of chinadialogue.net
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