Shanghai: At the house where Mao Zedong and 12 others met 100 years ago to find the Chinese Communist Party, President Xi Jinping recently led his politbiro to read oath to enforce the principles and people.
The unclear Shanghai page in 1921 is now a fancy memorial hall, a focal point like China celebrating Centenary on Thursday parties that control the most populous countries in the world and the second largest economy.
The first party congress site now records China’s “insults” in the hands of warlords and imperialists, “resurrection” in the early 20th century and its resurrection after the 1949 party victory in the Civil War who sent Chiang Kai-shek nationalist into exile in Taiwan.
Warning in what has become a class of boutique and restaurant environments reflect something more broadly: the myth-making project to strengthen Chinese messages at home and abroad, align with the call XI this month to tell more positive stories about China.
But even when China celebrates, it’s removed.
Montage The video that stirred highlighted China’s most proud achievement, including its first atomic bomb, the construction of prestige infrastructure and unmanned missions recently to Mars.
It was ignored was the main turmoil of the 20th century that historians were taken into account millions: hunger of “big leap” in 1958-1960, decades of chaos in the “cultural revolution” from 1966 and harsh acts that killed hundreds or even thousands of thousands.
Activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
“There is a lot of history (parties) need to forget,” said Robert Bickers, a party historian at British Bristol University.
“It has devoted a lot of efforts throughout 100 years to ensure that there is an agreed historical text that needs to be celebrated.” Both the State Council Information Office and the CCP Party Research and Party Research Office responded to a fax request for comments.
‘Historical nihilism’ party has long tried to control history.
The effort increased under XI, who had pioneered a campaign against “historical nihilism”, defined as an effort to use the past to question the party’s main role or “inevitable” Chinese socialism.
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has established a specialist historical unit to spread the official version of the past.
This year Beijing established a hotline for citizens to report historical nihilism to the authorities.
Glenn Tiffert, a historian at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, said this campaign reflects the insecurity of the party and rooted in the worries of XI that it could collapse like his Soviet partner, was overthrown in 1991.
“It seems to be the first of the hostile,” he said.
“This is part of a more systematic and integrated approach to rebuild party authorities and ensure it does not run the way the Soviet Communist Party.” Apart from XI’s efforts to emphasize the continuity of a long-century party effort to rejuvenate China, the new Memorial Hall shows that the party has moved away from its roots.
While it described its first decade as a victory of Marxist ideas, it was not mentioned about theoretical contorting that allowed the party to dispose of the Collectivism of the Maoist era and launched market reform that changed its economy to the second largest and also the most unequal.
The list of parties “facts and numbers” published by Shanghai official every day this month barely mentioned ideology, said the party’s mission was “to seek happiness for Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation”.
“It’s not about trust in communism anymore, it’s about giving goods,” Tiffert said.
“And to maintain that, they want to cover all the steps.” The Xuzhen, a 89-year-old child visited a warning hall in a wheelchair, gladly given the party’s achievements, said the organization he joined seven decades had saved him from hard work and slavery.
The Communist Party “has helped many changed in this country, especially for people in the countryside, the poor and all minorities,” he said.