Evan Osnos
At a secretive conclave this week, China’s Communist Party is busy excising the unwanted chapters of its history. The resulting portrait—which may shape the future even more than the past—will be enshrined in a pronouncement with a title that leaves no doubt about its emphasis: “The Resolution of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on the Major Achievements and Historical Experiences of the Party’s Hundred-Year Struggle.”
In the argot of Communist politics, the session that began on November 8th is the sixth plenum of the Nineteenth Central Committee. In practice, it’s the last big occasion for the paramount leader, Xi Jinping, to cement his dominance before next year, when he is expected to begin a third term as leader. (He got rid of term limits in 2018.) The meeting this week carries special significance: the Party, for only the third time in its history, will issue a verdict on past events, a maneuver of power politics that George Orwell famously described when he wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
The full self-portrait won’t be released until after the meeting—which consists of four days of closed sessions—but it’s been clear for months that Xi is determined to eradicate what he calls “historical nihilism,” the corrosive doubt that could threaten the dominance of his party. During the summer, China’s official online Rumor Refutation Platform, a Web site that collects public tips and reports levels of purportedly false content online, warned of attempts to “smear Party history” through what it called efforts to “slander and discredit revolutionary leaders.” Under Chinese law, a person found to have spread a rumor faces up to fifteen years in prison. A list of the “top-ten” most-circulated “rumors” ranged from deep strategic questions—“Did the Communist Party avoid confronting the Japanese army directly?”—to sensitive details, such as the suggestion that Chairman Mao’s son died during the Korean War because he gave away his battlefield position by “cooking egg fried rice.” (Mao Anying died in an air strike in 1950. The fried-rice story, which has never been confirmed, outrages nationalists and Party agencies.)
But the effort runs deeper than removing unflattering discussions online; it is shaping up as the historiographical equivalent of bulldozing a cemetery. Earlier this year, an official volume known as “A Short History of the Chinese Communist Party” was revised to limit discussion of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s calamitous social and political campaign, which resulted in the worst famine in recorded history. (The previous rendering of the Great Leap Forward carried the admonition “This bitter historical lesson shouldn’t be forgotten.”) The revised history also removed a candid assessment of the Cultural Revolution, the decade of bloody chaos that Mao set in motion in 1966. In an article published in September in the journal China Quarterly, Patricia Thornton, a specialist in Chinese politics at Oxford, observed that the official history of this turmoil had been “replaced with an account that restricted its focus to highlighting various industrial, technological and diplomatic advances.”
A verdict on history is a tool for clarifying who has accumulated sufficient power to render it. In 1945, after years of purges and infighting, a resolution cemented Mao’s supremacy by declaring that his ideological “line” had prevailed over the errors of his opponents. In 1981, when Deng Xiaoping was steering China toward a pro-growth brand of Leninism, the Party lifted him by pinning blame for the Cultural Revolution on the “Left errors” of Mao and his radicals.
For Xi, pruning China’s history to remove patterns of infighting, dissent, suffering, and discrimination is a technique for engineering the future. It is the next step in a march to remove obstacles from his path, beginning with the arrests of his political opponents, after he took power nine years ago; extending into a sweeping campaign of incarceration and human-rights abuses against dissidents, writers, and Muslims in the Xinjiang region; and eventually reaching into the ranks of China’s oligarchs, by kicking away the power of business leaders such as Jack Ma, who retired from the tech giant Alibaba in 2019, and by redoubling China’s claims to sovereignty over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and other disputed regions. Xi’s use of history projects the message that the struggles of the first century of Communist Party rule have been buried by the need to cohere around Xi’s pursuit of strength, dignity, and obedience—what he calls “the great rejuvenation” of China.
Xi’s party has taken to calling the great rejuvenation “an irreversible historical process,” a concept that echoes with some of the triumphant certainty that attached to Western liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War. But Geremie Barmé, a historian of China living in New Zealand, notes that, in the current case, the promise of inevitability is framed largely around the leader. “His works have been published in luxurious volumes; every speech he makes is celebrated as ‘important’—his every statement and quotation is hailed as ‘golden formulations,’ ” Barmé told me. “His activities, history, and personality are limned in terms that suggest an approaching apotheosis.”
At the moment, outside analysts see no major threat to Xi’s power, but the history of the Chinese Communist Party casts doubt on the prospect of a simple, certain future. “After all, since 1936 there has been only one peaceful transition of power within the Chinese Communist Party, and that was in 2002, when Hu Jintao, designated as heir by Deng Xiaoping, took over the reins as Party General Secretary from Jiang Zemin,” Barmé said. Far more often, the pressures of ambition and factionalism within the Party have given rise to sudden bids for power and dominance.
The more Xi closes down the routes for advancement, dissent, and individual success, the more he risks fostering a kind of political sepsis—a volatile, sometimes fatal, rot from within. It is a lesson contained in the past, but one has to be open to seeing it. In July, in a speech marking the Party’s hundredth anniversary, Xi addressed a hand-picked crowd of more than seventy thousand people. He turned, as he often does in speeches, to the power of history. “By learning from history, we can understand why powers rise and fall,” he said. “Through the mirror of history, we can find where we currently stand, and gain foresight into the future.” Perhaps, but only if the mirror is true.
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