History

History
历史

History / 历史

History / 历史

Brief

According to one globally shared view of history, its study informs human behaviour. Even in China, George Santayana’s famous words, “[t]hose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, have the familiar ring of truth. But history’s constant exploitation is also a fact across much of the world. Following the tradition of “correct” history writing laid down in the Soviet Union under Stalin in 1938, China’s ruling Communist Party has long viewed the shaping of history as a crucial means of justifying and defending the regime. Under Xi Jinping since late 2012, the emphasis on the Party’s official vision of history as a source of power and legitimacy has only strengthened.

Analysis

Since its origin in the 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party has adhered to a materialist conception of history,[1] a doctrine of linear historical progress proceeding through class struggle. Armed with this socialist historiography, Mao Zedong established himself as China’s revolutionary leader in the 1940s, and in the decades that followed this conception of history legitimised the CCP as a revolutionary and ruling Party. In the CCP’s first formal resolution on history in 1945, Mao Zedong summarised the key political lessons since the Party’s founding in 1921. The resolution, which followed Mao’s successful purging of his political opposition, focused criticism on the supposed damage caused in the preceding decade by “left-leaning opportunism”, and formalised Mao’s supremacy, laying the foundation for catastrophic failure of the Cultural Revolution – a decade hugely destructive to China’s cultural heritage.

After Mao’s death, the CCP set off on a new path of reform and opening. A new consensus on history was required to explain the failings of the Mao era and consolidate the foundation of power under the reform agenda. This came in 1981 with Deng Xiaoping’s Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the PRC (关于建国以来党的若干历史问题的决议), which served to reframe the reform project and settle the question of the “erroneous theories and practices” of the Cultural Revolution, while not undermining Mao’s revolutionary role, insisting that Mao’s “contributions to the Chinese revolution far outweigh his mistakes”.

Similarly, the CCP’s third resolution on history, the November 2021 Resolution on the Major Achievements and Historical Experiences of the Party’s Hundred-Year Struggle (中共中央关于党的百年奋斗重大成就和历史经验的决议), declared a new direction for the CCP and reconsolidated its claim to power under the leadership of Xi Jinping. The resolution, which established Xi as the pioneer and charismatic leader of a “New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” (中国特色社会主义新时代), cemented his power and legacy. Xi’s “New Era”, a period covering less than one-tenth of the CCP’s 100-year history, occupied more than half of the resolution text.

Under Xi Jinping, the CCP has sharpened its focus on the Party’s revolutionary history. It has spoken in the official media of “red genes” (红色基因), referring to the revolutionary spirit and Party’s history as a political and cultural inheritance of the Chinese people, and has even sought to safeguard its revolutionary legacy with campaigns against “historical nihilism” – meaning denial of the Party’s official history and its materialist historical development – and legislation against the defaming of heroes.  Also under Xi Jinping, there has been a renewed focus on China’s “excellent traditional culture” as a resource of Party legitimacy, seen particularly in Xi’s 2012 notion of the “Chinese dream” of a “great rejuvenation of the Chinese people”. This idea posits China’s return, after more than a century of humiliation at the hands of the West, to the centre of the world stage – a position, according to current CCP historiography, that Chinese civilisation held for much of its own history.

[1] L. Pang, ‘Mao’s Dialectical Materialism: Possibilities for the Future,’ in Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, February 2016, 28:1, 108-123.