This year marks the centennial of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Since the beginning of the year, Xi Jinping and the CPC have called for a national campaign to “learn the history of the Party. To this end, the CCP has recently released a 2021 edition of “A Brief History of the Chinese Communist Party. But is the CCP really qualified to write its own history? This new official version of the party history gives a negative answer.
The new edition of “A Short History of the Communist Party of China” is 531 pages in ten chapters, with about 280,000 words. But the history of the CCP after the 18th National Congress, that is, after Xi Jinping’s administration, takes up 146 pages, or a quarter of the book’s words. How can such a party history be a qualified history when the rest of the 90 years of the CCP’s history has been greatly compressed? If a history writer has the clear purpose of using history to serve politics, or even to smear history and create a halo for a certain individual, he is not qualified to write history.
Moreover, this history of the Party written by the CCP is full of all kinds of lies. Just take the Taiwan issue as an example. When the new version of the Party history writes about the Sunflower Movement, it positions it as “an anti-China event instigated and supported by Taiwan independence and external forces. As we all know, the Sunflower Movement was a spontaneous protest and demonstration by the new generation in Taiwan against the possible negative impact of the cross-strait trade agreement on Taiwan, and not only did it not raise any demand for Taiwan independence, but it was not incited by any external forces. I was there at the time and saw with my own eyes that even the DPP legislators who supported the students were unable to enter the venue without difficulty, much less participate in the decision making of the movement. Such a description can be said to be an outright fabrication, with not even one percent of truthfulness. I am sure similar problems abound in the book. What qualifications does such a party, which is full of lies, have to write history?
Not to mention that in the new version of the CPC history, a great deal of historical facts about the CPC’s 100-year journey from the founding of the party to the ruling party and from the founding of the country to today have been evaded or distorted. Would the CCP party history say that the CCP launched a civil war to fight for power, besieged the city in Changchun and prevented the people from leaving the city causing 300,000 innocent people to starve to death? The land reform movement carried out by the CCP around 1949 was essentially a robbery of landlords and rich peasants by force, resulting in the physical annihilation of millions of rural people from the gentry class, would such a thing be written into the party history? The Cultural Revolution, which even the CCP itself admitted at the end of the Cultural Revolution, was a catastrophe, but now Xi Jinping says, “Don’t use the history of the last 30 years to negate the history of the first 30 years”, disguisedly affirming the catastrophe and saying only that it was a “twist in the process of development”. Is such a history even remotely credible? Even in the decade after Xi Jinping’s rule, which the new version of the Party history emphasizes most, Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned to death simply because of his speech. Will the Chinese Communist Party write about the comprehensive persecution of the “709” group of lawyers? Will the CCP write about the tofu-dreg projects in the Wenchuan earthquake, the tainted milk powder incident, and the total destruction of China’s environment? If you take out the official version of the Party history, you will know that all these major events happened during the CPC’s rule and should be part of the CPC’s history. However, the CCP will not write them into history, and even if they do, they are distorted to the utmost. What qualifications does such a CCP have to write its own history?
As a century-old party, it is indeed very important for us to summarize its history. Only by seeing the true history can we have a clearer perception of the nature of today’s Chinese problems and the CCP’s problems. However, summarizing the CPC’s century-old party history should be written by the people, by objective scholars, and by brave historians, but not by the CPC itself.
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