The propaganda department’s surveillance of history is no longer limited to the Party’s time in power. In 2001, the latest version of its official history asserted that the Party’s ‘background’ had been extended back as far as 1840, ‘in order to explain the historical inevitability of the CCP’s establishment’. This decision immediately placed the history of a multitude of events, from the time of the first opium war, which marked the beginning of the lengthy period of subjugation of China by the imperialist west and later by Japan, under the auspices of the propaganda system. In turn, for any independent thinker working with history, the dangers of falling foul of the authorities were substantially increased.
The Party treats history as an issue of political management, in which the preservation of the Party’s prestige and power is paramount. Just as personnel decisions and corruption investigations are decided upon in-house, so too are sensitive historical debates all settled within the Party itself. The debates over history are invariably held in secret and often conducted in code. There is none of the overt public jostling and conference-floor debate that characterizes wrenching ideological changes in left-wing political parties around the world, such as Britain’s Labour Party or the French Socialists.
On events such as the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the suppression of the Tibet uprising in 1959, the pro-democracy protests in 1989, and so on, the Party simply announced its verdict after internal deliberations. Party officials are bound by these pronouncements on history, whatever they think as individuals, somewhat in the same way that ministers in the Westminster system are bound by Cabinet decisions. You either support the decision wholeheartedly, or you are out. The Party’s verdict then, in theory, becomes the collective opinion of the entire country and its 1.3 billion people. Chinese who wish to agitate publicly for an alternative view do so at their own risk.
The propaganda department does not underestimate the gravity of its task in enforcing the official line. Nothing less than national security is at stake. ‘In China, the head of the Central Propaganda Department is like the Secretary of Defense in the United States and the Minister of Agriculture in the former Soviet Union,’ said Liu Zhongde, a deputy-director of the department for eight years from 1990. ‘The manner by which he brings leadership will affect whether the nation can maintain stability.’
One of the propaganda department’s greatest recent battles in the history wars–how to manage the cataclysmic collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe in the late eighties and early nineties–is still being fought out today. As late as 2006, an eight-episode DVD series about the lessons from the Soviet Union’s demise, classified as ‘secret’, was distributed to central, provincial and city-level party bodies as compulsory viewing. Ahead of the 2007 party congress, the authorities were still on the lookout for any mention of the Soviet collapse and the Cold War that preceded it. Before the meeting, the department issued twenty general guidelines for editors in the choice of news for the year. Edict nineteen directed them to ‘strictly control reports on the ninetieth anniversary of the October Revolution and not to play up the disintegration of the Soviet Union’.
When around the same time the author and economics columnist for the Financial Times Martin Wolf was negotiating to have his book on globalization released in China, the changes insisted on by Citic Publishing, a major state organ, all centred on his characterization of the Soviet Union and communist dictators. Instead of the ‘communist dictatorship’ of the Soviet Union, the Chinese publisher wanted to substitute ‘Soviet leaders at the time’ the Soviet ‘communist system’ was to be replaced by ‘centrally planned economy’ and in a list of power-hungry dictators, including Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Lenin, Mao’s and Lenin’s names were to be removed.
Hollywood trivia touching on the Soviet period does not escape scrutiny either. Casino Royale, a James Bond film, was released in China in early 2007 with much emphasis in the media that it was uncensored. In fact, Dame Judi Dench, who plays the spy boss M, was asked to rerecord a single line of dialogue in English for the Chinese release. In place of: ‘Christ, I miss the Cold War’, M said, in English, in Chinese cinemas only: ‘God, I miss the old times.’ Only after that line of dialogue was inserted was the movie cleared to be shown.
The end-of-history thesis may have fallen into disrepute in a western world battered by lengthy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the western banking crisis, but it still stalks the Party in China. Li Ruigang, the youthful head of the Shanghai Media Group, was part of a Chinese media delegation to Germany in May 2007, which included a senior editor of the People’s Daily. Talking to friends after the trip, Li recalled how the editor had been struck by an exhibit in Bonn’s history museum about the collapse of the communist east. The exhibit was illustrated with the final front page of the then East German party paper before its ignominious closure. ‘I wonder if they’ll keep our last edition in a museum as well,’ the editor remarked sardonically to the group.
Instead of being the Party’s soft underbelly, history has been armour-plated to become a blunt weapon of foreign and domestic policy for China, a way to rouse the masses in support of the government. China’s regular, belligerent lectures to Japan about the need to have the ‘correct view of history’, and engage in the same deep introspection as post-war Germany, have been effective in stirring popular anger among young people against the ‘little devils’ across the sea. ‘Japan has wilfully tampered with history, denied its invasion [of China], and whitewashed its atrocities, and therefore sunk into unprecedented isolation in Asia,’ said the People’s Daily in 2005, a time of large street protests against Japan in China. ‘The Japan that wants to become a “normal country” would do well to take a look, and see how Germany used history as its own mirror.’
China’s grievances against Japan are based on memories of genuine atrocities fuelled by persistent pockets of ugly revisionism in Tokyo. Likewise, the ‘century of humiliation’ seared into the consciousness of young Chinese in history class at schools is founded on real events, of gunboat diplomacy, military invasions, racial discrimination and colonial annexations, that cast little credit on the west. But Chinese lectures to Japan and others about history are difficult to take seriously as long as the Party refuses to allow similar scrutiny by its citizens of the Party’s own record. Holding up the ‘mirror of history’ to the Party is something that is not condoned at home.
The Party responds ruthlessly to suggestions that its verdict on major political conflicts might be revised. Jiang Yanyong, the military surgeon hailed as a hero by many Chinese for blowing the whistle on the SARS cover-up, was detained a little over a year later when his letter denouncing the 1989 Beijing crackdown was leaked. The most sensitive part of the letter suggested that two now-deceased senior leaders who backed the military action, Yang Shangkun and Chen Yun, had told the doctor privately that the official verdict on the events would have to be revised. Such news has electrifying import in China. The revision of history doesn’t mean a simple rewriting of school textbooks. It signifies a seismic shift in the political landscape. The many families who make up the Party aristocracy have a direct personal interest in shoring up the official version of the crackdown.
To take two examples: the considerable power, prestige and wealth of the families of Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng, who personally announced the declaration of martial law in 1989, are directly threatened by any revision of what they call the ‘Tiananmen incident’. And if top leaders can be held to account for what they did in the past, what about the officials who have wielded semi-dictatorial powers at a local level? Couldn’t they be challenged as well? Rewriting the Party’s verdicts on history involves the same kind of mortal dangers to the system as allowing independent bodies to investigate corruption. Once you start, where do you stop? Or, more to the point, how do you stop? The Party wants to control not just the government and society of China. For sound political reasons, it needs to manage the narrative of China as wel
l, because if this narrative unravelled, it could devour them all.
By compiling Tombstone, Yang had challenged the system too, but he insisted he did not want to bring the Party down. Yang and his collaborators were party members and all, in one way or another, lifetime, paid-up participants in the system. That was why Yang had blanched at the reviews predicting the Party would collapse as the truth about the past came to light. ‘I fretted about that,’ he said. Yang’s aim was not to encourage the Party to circle the wagons even more tightly, but to open it up. In the long run, telling the truth about history was not only the key to the Party’s survival, it was also essential to China’s legitimacy as a great power. ‘It is impossible for China to become a superpower if historical truths are suppressed,’ says Yang. ‘That’s why I said that a nation that dares not face up to history will have no future. The Party has to put down its burdens in order to march forward.’
The Party’s biggest single burden was the Great Helmsman himself. In China’s history wars, the big battles have invariably been over the communist commitment to protect Mao, who still remains the single, overarching symbol of the Party and the nation.
When I asked Li Rui what he thought of Mao Zedong, who was, at different times over four decades, his mentor, his boss and, more than once, his prosecutor and jailer, in no particular order, he chuckled and shot back a characteristically brisk answer. ‘My first impression?’ he said. ‘I thought, here was a true leader of the Communist Party.’ Li was born into China’s first modern revolution, in 1917, between the fall of the last of China’s dynasties, the Qing, and the launching of China’s modern nationalism movement. His mother propelled him headlong into the new China by insisting her only son be raised outside his feudal village in Hunan province, so that he could attend a western-style school. By his early teens, Li was fronting schoolboy protests against warlords. At university, he took up the anti-Japanese cause and ran into conflict with Chiang Kai-shek’s ruling Nationalists, who gave him his first taste of jail, locking him up in 1936 for possessing Marxist books. The Nationalists drove Li into the arms of the communists and Mao, who was cementing his leadership in the nascent party’s stronghold in Yan’an, in central Shaanxi province, when they met in 1939. Li, and soon the rest of China, was about to find out what a ‘true leader of the Communist Party’ was really like.
When I met him in 2003, Li was a wiry, irrepressible 86-year-old with tufts of spiky grey hair and gleaming eyes, perched like a wizard in his favourite armchair, bristling with energy and opinions. On the wall of his neat apartment were draped large red characters. Hung to celebrate his recent birthday, the characters stood for longevity (literally, ‘life is longer than the southern mountain’). His frankness made interviewing him disarming, even a little uncomfortable. It was a feeling you often get as a journalist in China. When interviewees start opening up and criticizing the Party, the journalist in you is thrilled. As an individual, however, there is a simultaneous creeping sense of fear, about what trouble interviewees might fall into afterwards.
Li’s address alone in Beijing was a sign that he was a survivor of the murderous hurly-burly of Maoist politics. He lived in a series of apartment buildings known as the Ministers’ House. Alongside one of the wide, grimy Los Angeles-style highways (minus the palm trees) that bound the capital in concentric, elongated loops, the Ministers’ House is reserved for retired cadres and their families. No one who finishes their career on the wrong side of the Party gets to live there. Li’s top syturvy career had ended on a high, as a vice-minister of the Central Organization Department for two years from 1982. For part of that time, he was in charge of the careers of young cadres. The patronage he bestowed on the young officials coming to office in the first, enlightened years of the post-Mao era came in handy when he re-emerged as a trenchant public critic of the Party. Many of the leaders who rose to power in the early years of this century had been helped by Li in the early eighties. Later, some would return the favour, by tolerating his outspokenness–just–without extending the same courtesy to the local media outlets which reported what he said.
Li was more than simply a survivor of Mao. At the time I met him, he was perhaps the only senior insider living in China willing to talk publicly and in explicit detail about the taboo topic of Mao’s legacy. The China built in the wake of Mao’s death in 1976 is largely unrecognizable from the xenophobic, dispirited and sinister country, verging on collapse and civil war, that the Great Helmsman bequeathed his successors. But Mao himself survives as the single unifying thread tying the vital, modernizing country that greets visitors to today’s China with the horrors that preceded it. Mao’s presence remains so ubiquitous in twenty-first-century China that it barely provokes comment any more.
‘What is there new to say about Mao?’ said a prominent US Sinologist when I prodded him on the issue. But that is precisely the point. The victims of Mao’s political campaigns put him firmly among the big three slaughterers of the twentieth century, along with Stalin and Hitler. By drawing a veil over Mao, the Party has effectively shut down all political debate. ‘The Mao issue is the dark heart of everything that is contemporary China,’ said Geremie Barmé, of the Australian National University. ‘The whole project [of modern China] is based on a series of lies, not just about Mao, but the collective leadership he has come to represent. It has profound ramifications–it means that China can’t grow up. It is a society that has forbidden itself from being able to grapple not only with the legacy of Mao, but with civil change.’
Mao’s exalted status is easily explained, up to a point. As the leader of the Communist Party and the Red Army, he founded a new and united China in 1949, restoring pride to a nation dismembered by multiple foreign powers over a century, starting with the ceding of Hong Kong to the British after the first opium war in 1842. Beyond the revolution, the explanation for Mao’s survival as a symbol of the nation is equally straightforward. Mao’s fate is tied to that of the Party. ‘The biggest legacy of Mao is the Communist Party of China,’ Li said. ‘As long as the Party exists, the impact of Mao will be enduring.’
Li admits to having been enthralled by Mao when they met, but his outspokenness soon got him into trouble. In Yan’an, he helped set up The Lighthorseman, a newspaper circulated by being affixed to walls around the town. The paper’s life followed a pattern for the press that would become familiar in Mao’s early years. Its frankness was invigorating, until it offended a senior leader, after which it was promptly shut down and its editors politically crucified. Li then became a writer for Liberation Daily, a party paper, where his forceful editorials coincided with a brutal purge of people damned as ‘reactionaries and spies’. It was poor timing for Li, who ended up facing trumped-up charges of spying himself. Hundreds of people were tortured and left to die. Li was lucky. He was jailed for just over a year. About ten years later he came to his leader’s attention again during an early debate about the construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze river, a massive project that eventually got under way amidst huge controversy in the nineties. In 1958, Mao, favourably impressed by Li’s views, hired him as one of his advisers. Once again Li’s timing was out. By 1959, Mao was under pressure after the first reports of the unfolding famine began to percolate up to the centre.
At a meeting of the Central Committee in the lushly green mountain retreat of Lushan that year to discuss the Great Leap Forward, Li voiced criticism of the policy in a meeting with Mao and some colleagues. At first, Mao seemed receptive. ‘One reason Mao could listen and accept some opposite opinions was that these ideas were raised by small potatoes like us, who posed no threat to him, rather than by a member of the Standing Committee.’ But Mao’s mood changed when Peng Dehuai, a Politburo member and Defence Minister, condemned the campaign. Li compounded his sins by comparing Mao with ‘Stalin in his late years’, saying ‘he cannot cloud the whole sky with his single hand’. Sensing a threat to his leadership, Mao lashed back. Peng was removed and ‘small potatoes’ like
Li were thrown out with him.
At Lushan today, tourists crowd the hall and other buildings, which have been preserved in honour of Mao and the historic meeting. In an Orwellian touch, the accompanying exhibition says Mao ‘first discovered’ the problems of the Great Leap Forward during the meeting. In fact, he had already received reports of starvation, and even then continued the policies, prolonging the famine for another two years, at the cost of approximately another 20 million lives. ‘Mao’s basic aim was to be the strongest, most powerful Emperor of China ever,’ Li recalled. ‘And he thought that an Emperor should never have to make a self-criticism.’ As punishment for opposing Mao, Li was separated from his wife and two daughters and exiled to the Chinese gulag in Heilongjiang, in the frigid north-east. As he recounts the story, Li opens his diary on the table in front of him and points out the pages recording this period: ‘I picked up a little green melon in the wild land, ate it and then felt like I was a savage. I’ve become so used to having wild vegetables now. We were too optimistic at Lushan, too optimistic in 1958!’ Li sighs and puts the book down. ‘The strongest suffering a person can have is starving,’ he says. Li worked fifteen hours a day and watched as other exiled intellectuals collapsed and died around him.
Li was later sent to Anhui, where he worked in the power industry for two years until the launching of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. For Li, the memory of the moment the campaign caught up with him is vivid. Late one evening in 1967, he was savouring a rare purchase of honey when two jeeps with six armed men rushed into his compound and invited him to come to the city ‘for a chat’. He knew his fate the moment he stepped on board the plane for Beijing the next day and saw that, besides the guards, he was the only passenger. He was transported to Beijing’s Qincheng, notorious since 1949 as a jail for political prisoners. He didn’t get a chance to savour honey, or anything remotely like it, for the next eight years. ‘I was a dead tiger by then.’
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