The “History of the Chinese Communist Party, Volume 1,” the first entry in the Party’s official autobiography, appeared in 2002. Its authors had the luxury of hewing to a narrative of birth, growth, and triumph, covering the years between 1921 and the revolution, in 1949. After that, history gets dicier.
Volume 2, on the period from 1949 to 1978, had to tiptoe through a chronological minefield of purges, famine, policy disasters, and other awkward artifacts of history that many living officials would prefer to leave unexamined. The volume, a thousand and seventy-four pages long, was edited for sixteen years. It needed four major rewrites. It was vetted and scrubbed by sixty-four different government and Party agencies, and then received line edits from the most powerful families mentioned in its pages.
By the time it was released, in 2011, only one of the original three editors, Shi Zhongquan, had lived long enough to see it in print. “Writing history is not easy,” he said to the journalist Andrew Higgins. For all of the editors’ labors, the reception from independent scholars was not flattering; the official history explained that, once Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward drove the nation into famine, he “worked hard to correct” the mistakes, a judgment that a Dutch scholar called a “barefaced lie.”
Volume 3 has yet to be written, but historians should prepare for an even knottier process. It will cover a period that includes not only China’s historic economic boom but also the bloody crackdown that ended the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989, an event that has turned out to be among the most thoroughly and systematically suppressed memories in the history of official histories. Initially, the problem with Tiananmen was not that it was documented too little. There were so many eyewitness accounts that, as Louisa Lim writes in her new book, “The People’s Republic of Amnesia,” “publishing houses worldwide were rejecting them, citing the saturation of the market.” At the time, a dissident named Fang Lizhi predicted that the sheer volume of documentation would force a “failure of the ‘Technique of Forgetting History,’ ” which had been so essential to Party control.
Fang, who died in 2012, underestimated the capacity to forget. June 4th marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the military onslaught that ended nearly two months of pro-reform protests in Beijing and in other Chinese cities. When tanks and soldiers moved through the capital, they killed hundreds of students and city residents; the precise death toll remains a state secret. On the anniversary, those deaths will undoubtedly go unmentioned in the Chinese press and in Chinese schools, and, as much as the censors can manage, they will be blocked on the Chinese Web. (The digital filter is so tight that targets unrelated to Tiananmen get caught in it: for a while, Chinese programmers were barred from updating a software system because the version number, 0.6.4, corresponded with June 4th. People still look for ways around the blocks, using codes—“May 35” “63 plus 1”—but the censors catch up, and the cat-and-mouse game continues.)
To prevent any commemoration of the anniversary, the government has, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an activist group, “detained, disappeared or summoned” dozens of lawyers, activists, artists, and journalists. Unlike in past years, this sweep—the largest round of detentions in China since the Arab Spring—has targeted not only attempts at public protests but also memorials in private homes. The lawyer Pu Zhiqiang and four others who attended a private meeting to commemorate the crackdown were detained under a newly expansive violation known as “picking quarrels.” In anticipation of the anniversary, the government has also disrupted Google searches and access to Gmail, and has blocked additional foreign news sites, such as the Chinese-language edition of the Wall Street Journal.
In 1949, the year of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, George Orwell, in “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” conjured a future in which the ruling party declares, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Orwell describes the process of forgetting as a matter not of technology but of will. “All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory,” he wrote.
Today, technology and globalism are prying open the private, economic, and social lives of China’s people. But, in matters of politics and history, the Party is determined to silence even the “few flies” that Deng Xiaoping once described as a bearable side effect of an open window to the world. The more inconvenient the arguments, the more the Party vows to obscure them. Qu Qingshan, a senior historian working for the Party Central Committee, told China’s Oriental Outlook magazine that “a large number of publications that distort Party history” had recently been released by Chinese authors abroad. “This brings chaos to education on Party history within China,” he said. History, Qu argued, is not about a diversity of views and facts: “Studying Party history is mainly to increase social consensus and unity.”
China’s President, Xi Jinping, took power in March, 2013, and he has proved to be especially determined to control the past. In a communiqué to Party members a month after his ascension, the leadership warned that “historical nihilism” posed a threat to the Party’s very existence. The act of rejecting C.C.P. history is “tantamount to denying the legitimacy of the CCP’s long-term political dominance,” they wrote.
A remarkable fact about the Party’s determination to shape history is how effective it has been in framing the violence in 1989 as insignificant in the grand scheme, because it came amid broader gains in human development. In the government’s only official acknowledgement of the anniversary, the Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said, “In the last three decades and more of reform and opening up, China’s enormous achievements in social and economic development have received worldwide attention. The building of democracy and the rule of law have continued to be perfected.” The message has been delivered to young people, in particular. We often imagine that young Chinese know nothing about the events of 1989; reporters who ask students to identify the image of the “tank man” frequently get blank stares. But more than a few students know the details and have applied a shade to the history. Several years ago, I met Liu Yang, a graduate student in environmental engineering at Stanford, who grew up in China. We happened to be chatting on the day of the nineteenth anniversary of Tiananmen Square, and, as I later wrote in The New Yorker, I asked him what he thought of the incident. He said, “If June 4th had succeeded, China would be worse and worse, not better.”
The Party, of course, agrees, but it does not have enough confidence in the position to expose it to public debate. The Party may be proud of insuring stability, but Tiananmen Square has become unmentionable. Members of the military who took part in putting down the demonstrations were given souvenir watches with a picture of the Gate of Heavenly Peace and inscribed with the words “June 89 to Commemorate the Quelling of the Turmoil.” But today military leaders who have risen into the senior ranks of political leadership have scrubbed their involvement in the incident from their official biographies. As Zhang Gang, a former policy adviser to the Beijing leadership, told the Telegraph this week, “They say they saved the Party and the country. So how come no one wants to be associated with it, to remember it or to take credit for this supposed triumph?”
Forgetting can be an act of will, but so can remembering. By staying silent on the events of Tiananmen Square instead of making a case that it was a mistake in the rise of a nation, Party leaders have not succeeded in effacing it from history. They have simply ceded the subject to their opponents, and, year by year, Tiananmen is discovered and rediscovered by young people, for whom it is a stark measure of the gap between China’s official and unofficial histories.
Photograph: Patrick Zachmann/Magnum
