Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC), recently stressed at a mobilization meeting for Party history study and education that historical nihilism should be flagrantly opposed, adding that the CPC is not a historical nihilist and “cannot forget its ancestors and be presumptuous”. However, observers point out that the new edition of ‘A Brief History of the Communist Party of China (1921-2021)’, launched to celebrate the centenary of the founding of the CCP, only covers the nine years of the party’s history since Xi Jinping took power, accounting for a quarter of the entire book.
Except for the “new era of Xi Jinping”, which is covered in detail in this brief history, some extremely important history has been diluted or even ignored. Most importantly, the history of the appalling decade of the Cultural Revolution is downplayed. In the “Seventy Years of the Chinese Communist Party” and the “Brief History of the Chinese Communist Party” published in 1991 and 2001, the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong, which pushed Chinese society to the brink of collapse, is a separate chapter, and the titles of the chapters are clearly labeled “Cultural Revolution” and “Ten Years of Civil Unrest. “The new version of the Party History, which sings Xi Jinping’s praises, includes the 10-year history of the Cultural Revolution in Chapter 6, Section 3, “Socialist Construction Develops in Twists and Turns.
To label such a brutal and massive crime campaign launched by Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong as “twists and turns” and to use the Chinese Communist Party’s term “problems in progress” to cover up a heinous evil that caused countless deaths is, in the view of observers, the real To observers, this is the real “historical nihilism”.
The new version of the Party history is not only not dedicated to the Cultural Revolution, but also to the “anti-rightist struggle” in 1957 and the “Great Leap Forward” launched by Mao Zedong in 1958 to “catch up with Britain and surpass the United States”. The consequences of the Great Leap Forward led to the disappearance of 40 million Chinese people who were starved alive from the pages of the catalog, the “People’s Commune Movement” that deprived the peasants of their land, and the gradual formation of the guiding ideology of “class struggle as a platform”.
The anti-rightist struggle led to the decentralization, expulsion, and exile of millions of intellectuals, many of whom died of starvation in the countryside during the late Great Leap Forward, a famous example being Jibiangou. The three years of starvation that began in 1960, described in the history of the Communist Party of China as the “three years of natural disasters,” was a direct result of the Great Leap Forward movement, which forced everyone to make iron and led to the desolation of the fields. The “class struggle” was the basic weapon of the Communist Party since the establishment of the government until the early 1980s to launch campaigns for the “ideological transformation” of people, and the People’s Commune Movement was the main culprit of the decline of the countryside.
The new version of the Party History no longer includes the Cultural Revolution and other “serious mistakes” of the 30 years of Mao’s rule in the table of contents, but still maintains the characterization of the CCP in 1981, but makes changes in the cause and course of the Cultural Revolution, excusing Mao in a roundabout way. It emphasizes that “the leaders launched it by mistake” but “it was used by the counter-revolutionary groups” and “left behind an extremely painful lesson”.
The most nihilistic aspect of the new version of the Party history lies in the interpretation and definition of the “two 30 years”, the first 30 years referring to the period of Mao’s rule and the second 30 years referring to the period of reform and opening up led by Deng Xiaoping after the end of the Cultural Revolution and the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th CPC Central Committee. Therefore, before Xi Jinping took power, the history of the 60 years of the CCP’s rule was mostly divided into two 30-year periods, with the first 30 years symbolized by Mao Zedong and the second 30 years collectively referred to as the Deng Xiaoping era.
But the year after Xi Jinping took power, in January 2013, he proposed that “two cannot be denied”, “the historical period after the reform and opening up cannot be used to deny the historical period before the reform and opening up, nor can the historical period before the reform and opening up be used to deny the historical period after the reform and opening up. “, there is an analysis that Xi Jinping is trying to blur the first 30 years represented by the Cultural Revolution and class struggle, and the second 30 years represented by economic construction and opening up to the outside world. Xi is steeped in Mao’s ideology, and even the great evils of the Cultural Revolution are merely “twists and turns” in development.
Xi explained why he demanded that “two cannot be denied” because, “as the ancients say, ‘to destroy a nation, one must first remove its history'”, there is no such thing as denying that the Chinese Communist Party was also the ruler of China from 1949 to 1979. There is no question of denying that the CCP was also the ruler of China from 1949 to 1979, but of explaining how that period of history was spent and what major events took place, which is called remembering history, otherwise it is “historical nihilism.
When Xi Jinping spoke at the 95th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party in 2016, he did not mention the Cultural Revolution, let alone the major mistakes the Communist Party had made, a step backwards from his predecessors Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin.
In the West, Mao has been compared to Hitler and Stalin, so why would Xi Jinping want to gloss over the Mao era? Speaking to Voice of America, philosopher Xu Youyu said the new version of the party history highlights Xi’s achievements and downplays Mao’s mistakes, reflecting Xi’s stubborn admiration for Mao and his pursuit of a historical status comparable to Mao’s. He believes that in the minds of CCP leaders, they feel that Mao is the greatest, and that Deng Jiang Hu is no match for him; if a person’s historical status can be compared to Mao’s, this is the standard of greatness.
In this scholar’s view, the new 2020 version of the brief history of the CCP is actually a propaganda training material to unify the Party’s thinking, which cannot stand the scrutiny and test of history.
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