China’s ruling party is watching its past as the centenary approaches

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Written by David Stanway

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – At the house where Mao Zedong and 12 others met 100 years ago to found the Chinese Communist Party, President Xi Jinping recently led his Politburo to take an oath to uphold principles and “sacrific everything” for the Party and the people. .

Now a stately memorial hall, the mysterious 1921 Shanghai Square is the focal point as China celebrates on Thursday the centenary of the party that controls the world’s most populous country and second largest economy.

The website of the first party congress now chronicles China’s “humiliation” at the hands of warlords and imperialists, its “vigilance” in the early 20th century and its revival after the party’s 1949 victory in the civil war that drove Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists into exile in Taiwan.

The festivities in what has become an upscale neighborhood of boutiques and restaurants reflect something broader: a myth-making project to amplify China’s message at home and abroad, in line with Xi’s call this month to tell more positive stories about China.

But even as China celebrates, it erases.

An exciting video montage highlights China’s proud achievements, including the first atomic bomb, the construction of prestigious infrastructure and the last unmanned mission to Mars.

The major upheavals of the 20th century that historians believe killed millions have been ignored: the “Great Leap Forward” famine of 1958-1960, the chaos decade of the “Cultural Revolution” of 1966 and the crackdown that killed hundreds or even thousands of supporters. Democracy activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

“There is a lot of its history (the party) to forget,” said Robert Beckers, a historian of the party at Britain’s University of Bristol. “I have devoted a great deal of effort over the course of 100 years to ensuring that there is an agreed-upon text of a date to be celebrated.”

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Neither the State Council Information Office nor the CPC History and Literature Research Bureau responded to faxed requests for comment.

“Historical Hellism”

The party has always sought to control history. This effort has intensified under Xi, who has led a campaign against “historical nihilism,” defined as any attempt to use the past to question the party’s leadership role or the “inevitability” of Chinese socialism.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has set up a specialized history unit to publish the official version of the past. This year, Beijing set up a hotline for citizens to report historical nihilism to authorities.

Glenn Tiffert, a historian at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said the campaign reflects the party’s insecurity and is rooted in Xi’s fears that he might collapse like his Soviet counterpart, who was ousted in 1991.

“That seems to have been a preoccupation for him from the start,” he said. “It is part of a more systematic and integrated approach to re-establishing Party power and ensuring that it does not go the way of the Soviet Communist Party.”

Despite Xi’s efforts to underscore the continuation of the party’s century-old effort to rejuvenate China, the new memorial hall shows that the party has moved away from its roots.

While he describes its early decades as a triumph of Marxist ideas, there is no mention of the theoretical twists that allowed the party to abandon the collectivism of the Maoist era and launch market reforms that transformed its economy into the world’s second largest and also one. One of the most inequalities.

A list of party “Facts and Figures” published by the official Shanghai Daily this month barely mentions the ideology, saying the party’s mission is to “search for the happiness of the Chinese people and rejuvenate the Chinese nation.”

“It’s no longer about believing in communism, it’s about handing over goods,” said Tiffert. “And in order to maintain that, they want to cover up all the slips.”

Visiting the memorial hall in a wheelchair, 89-year-old Yang Xuzhen was happy to recall the party’s achievements, saying that the organization she joined seven decades ago saved her from hard labor and slavery.

She said the Communist Party “has helped bring about a great change in this country, especially for the rural people, the poor, and all the minorities.”

(Reporting by David Stanway; Additional reporting by Zhao Jiang; Editing by William Mallard)

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