The People’s Republic of China is celebrating the 75th anniversary of its founding. However, their sometimes dark history cannot be discussed openly.
On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. In the decades that followed, countless people fell victim to the dictator’s rule. Up to 55 million people died during the “Great Leap Forward” campaign alone, and later the “Cultural Revolution” launched by Mao left a traumatized country behind.
On the 75th anniversary of the founding of the state, the dark chapters of Chinese history are largely ignored. What can be remembered is determined solely by the Communist Party under Xi Jinping. “It is an incapacitation of the people,” says sinologist Daniel Leese in an interview. “The party does not trust people to form their own judgment through critical discussion.”
Mr. Leese, when we in Germany look at our own past, it is natural for us not to ignore dark chapters such as the Nazi era or the SED dictatorship. How is that in China, which celebrates the 75th anniversary of its founding on October 1st?
Especially in the 1980s, there was a relatively strong movement in parts of the scientific community in China that made very similar demands: that one must learn from history so that the misfortunes experienced are not repeated. The Mao era was intensively discussed internally at the time, especially how to deal with the crimes committed during the Cultural Revolution. This “never again” is not completely foreign to Chinese historiography. But it is an aspect that has been marginalized in recent years.
Why?
For Xi Jinping History is central to the legitimacy of the state and especially party rule. Under Xi, the party and the state have virtually merged, and that is why the party has an enormous interest in telling only a sanitized version of what happened. If it were to allow its own history and all the catastrophes associated with it to be critically examined, then its legitimacy would falter.
“The Communist Party fulfills the ‘historic mission’ of leading China to power and wealth”
Since 2018, China has introduced a law that makes it a crime to “distort, denigrate, desecrate or deny the deeds and spirit of heroes and martyrs.”
This “denigration paragraph” makes it very difficult to speak critically about many aspects of Chinese history and impossible to write about them publicly. Surprisingly, in the last two years the scope of what can be said in purely academic circles has expanded somewhat. I experience more room for criticism again in discussions with Chinese colleagues. But this doesn’t find any public expression.
To person
Daniel Leese is professor of Chinese studies at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. His most recent publication was “Mao’s Long Shadow. China’s Dealing with the Past” and “Chinese Thought of the Present” (together with Shi Ming).
What does it mean for a people not to be able to speak openly about their own history and experiences?
It is an incapacitation of the people. The party does not trust people to form their own judgment through critical discussion.
What is Xi afraid of?
After the death of Mao Zedong, the Communist Party legitimized its rule primarily through economic growth: through a kind of unofficial contract between the people and the leadership, which states that high economic growth justifies the sole rule of the Communist Party. However, because growth has weakened noticeably since the global financial crisis in 2008, Xi Jinping has placed the emphasis on generating self-confidence in a different way: no longer through economic growth, but through one’s own history and culture. His focus is on maintaining and strengthening party rule. The Communist Party therefore fulfills the “historic mission” of leading China to power and wealth. This is intended to create solidarity even in bad times.
“Xi Jinping believes the people must be kept ignorant”
One would think that self-confidence also comes from openly admitting your own mistakes and learning from them.
For Xi, this would be “historical nihilism.” He sees it as a mistake to give up the narrative of one’s own history. In his opinion, that is exactly what the leadership of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev did and thus brought about their own end. For Xi, the party must make a strong selection of what is memorable. He believes that the people must be kept largely in ignorance and that it is up to the wisdom of the party leadership to set the framework within which to think and speak.
For a long time, the most important lesson from Mao’s rule in China was that no one person should ever again have unlimited power. The personality cult that Mao practiced was also rejected. Both are back under Xi – the personality cult and autocracy.
True, under Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping, these things were clearly denounced. Not least because Deng himself was a victim of the Cultural Revolution started by Mao. However, it is not the case that the cult of personality has completely disappeared. This continued to exist subliminally, from Deng, the “great architect,” down to the cadre at the local level. So it was relatively easy for Xi to reactivate it. Behind this lies his belief that only a single, strong leader can hold the party together, because otherwise too many individual interests would clash, first the party and then the country would fragment, and corruption would become rampant. One of the lessons of history that Xi has learned appears to be that a controlled cult of personality is less harmful than the corruption that was completely out of control before he took office.
“For Xi Jinping there is only one pan-Chinese identity”
But Xi Jinping also suffered under Mao. As a teenager he was sent to the countryside and had to live in a cave; his father, a high-ranking communist, fell from grace…
… and his half-sister probably committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. Of course, we don’t know how Xi feels about time deep down. In any case, the story he tells publicly is one of a time of turbulence, but one that also produced political talent. He himself discovered his political talent in the country where he was sent and grew into a leader. In general, however, Xi tries not to allow a discussion about the Cultural Revolution to even arise.
Ethnic minorities such as the Tibetans or the Uyghurs Xinjiang have their own perspective on the founding of the People’s Republic of China. For them, the destruction of their own culture began 75 years ago.
Since 2008 at the latest, the Communist Party has ensured that no independent voices from these two regions can be articulated in any way. This is not just incapacitation: it is a violent suppression of alternative forms of memory and identity. For Xi Jinping there is only one pan-Chinese identity; the perceptions of the different ethnic groups have no place there. Everyone should be grateful for the party’s achievements. That many people in Tibet or Xinjiang do not feel gratitude when they think of the Communist Party is more than understandable given the long-standing oppression.
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