Ramachandra Guha: How China imposed a vision of the past on citizens, aiming to control the future

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” runs one of the most famous lines in George Orwell’s novel, 1984. Orwell had the Russia of Stalin in mind here, but his aphorism is true, to lesser or greater degree, of all authoritarian regimes where the ruling party and the leader in charge seek to impose their version of history on every member of the population, whether young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, gay or straight.

In a relatively open society, no single version of history can be foisted upon the citizenry as a whole. In the United States of America, for example, when the Republicans are in power, they may try to impose their view of what race relations were or should be like, but this will be vigorously contested by those who understand the phenomenon very differently.

Even in flawed or partial democracies such as India, state-sponsored perspectives on the past are the subject of intense debates. For example, the Narendra Modi government has tried, with all the resources at its command, to present a particular (and particularly tendentious) picture of Hindu-Muslim relations.

It has also sought assiduously to diminish the contributions to the Republic of the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Yet there remain websites, publishing houses, YouTube channels and even the odd newspaper where the regime’s writ does not run, where those who understand these issues differently can articulate their views in public. It is to seek to tame these independent voices that a new broadcasting bill is now being proposed by the Modi government.

In contemporary times, no organisation has sought so strenuously to control how the people think – and do not think – as the Communist Party of China. In its presentation of the country’s past, present, and future, the CPC outlines, and defends, four core propositions.

First, that the Party is always right and infallible and that the Leader (once Mao Zedong, now Xi Jinping) is always right and infallible too;

Second, that the cadres and officials of the Party and, above all, the Great Leader are unceasingly devoted, day and night, spring, summer, autumn and winter, to the uplift of China, to making the nation secure and strong and its people happy and prosperous;

Third, that those who criticise the Party, its policies or its practices, in public or in private, are enemies of the nation, acting at the behest of foreign powers;

Fourth, if the Party does not firmly and swiftly quell these criticisms – and dispose of these critics –then China will revert to the dark period before the communists took power in 1949 when it was crippled by division, conflict and civil war and in the grip of malign Western powers.

Dissent from the party view of history is far harder in China than in India – let alone the US. Ever since 1949, speaking or writing against the regime runs the risk of being dismissed from one’s job, or arrested, or tortured, or even killed. Yet, as a recent book demonstrates, some exemplary individuals still dare to run these risks in presenting to their fellow citizens the truth about modern Chinese history and about the history of the communist party in particular.

Enemies of the people

The book is called Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future. Its author, Ian Johnson, spent many years as a reporter in China before being expelled by the regime. By then he had travelled to most parts of the country and interviewed a vast cross-section of its people, among them essayists, reporters, bloggers, and documentary film-makers on whom his book is based. Along the way, Johnson introduces the reader to the diversity of Chinese landscapes, urban and rural, to the depth of its cultural and civilisational history, and to its rich artistic, literary and philosophical traditions. His narrative reveals to us a China beyond Communism that might yet serve to inspire a China after Communism too.

Johnson writes unsparingly of the cruelties inflicted on Chinese people by Mao Zedong who was in power from 1949 until his death in 1976. Mao needed enemies, and so he found them everywhere – in farm and factory, town and country, even within the communist party itself. Millions of upright and hardworking Chinese citizens who had never remotely committed any crime at all were designated by Mao’s goons as “counter-revolutionaries” or as “enemies of the people”. If they were lucky, they were merely dispossessed of their homes or assigned menial jobs; if not so lucky, jailed or killed.

Mao was a peculiar blend of whimsy and murderous intent. In 1956, he called for people to speak their mind, saying “May a hundred flowers bloom.” When citizens took him at his word, he retracted his call, launching an “Anti-Rightist Campaign” which resulted in a wholesale purge of writers, teachers, students, lawyers, managers, civil servants, and scientists, indeed, of anyone with the remotest ability or training to think for themselves.

In the process, writes Johnson, “universities, high schools, research institutes, and government offices were gutted. Hundreds of thousands were sent to labour camps. Those who remained were cowed, trying to avoid the same fate by following the party’s every whim to the letter.”

Several of the “underground historians” profiled by Johnson are children or siblings of those who were jailed or killed by the state, their personal suffering animating them to alert a wider public about the dark side of communist rule in China. Through their work, they seek to tell the truth about the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the ravaging of Tibet, and other destructive projects that the so-called Great Helmsman conceived and oversaw.

Many of the dissidents Johnson writes about operated in the first decade of the 21st century, “a period of unusual openness”. They were encouraged by the growth of the internet, which allowed them to more freely circulate their writings and their films. Others got their start in the 1980s, also a time of relative artistic and intellectual freedom, ended by the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989. However, Johnson also talks of earlier precedents; such as a mimeographed magazine carrying articles and poems critical of the Party that circulated in small quantities in the late 1950s.

These underground historians, writes Johnson, aim “to challenge, destabilize, and contest the state’s version of reality”. Through their work, these non-state and often anti-state writers and film-makers hope to represent “an open, humane China that has always existed and for which people have always struggled”.

The work of these independent historians has become harder after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. Early in his term, Xi unveiled an ambitious programme for presenting the history of the Communist Party of China in the best possible light. A vast group of historians employed by the State were commanded with celebrating the party’s “great victories and brilliant achievements”.

They were instructed to ensure that the gullible younger generations were properly acquainted with the heroism and self-sacrifice of the party and its leaders down the decades. At the same time, these sarkari scribes were urged to “resolutely oppose any wrong tendencies to distort and vilify the party’s history”.

The odds against them may have increased, but, just as in Mao’s time, in Xi’s time too some individuals will continue to battle bravely against the grain. For, as Johnson writes, “the fact is that independent thought lives in China. It has not been crushed. Some writers, journalists, artist and film-makers will continue to show that ‘the party does not always win.’”

Reading about the individuals in this book, I was struck not only by their moral and physical courage but also by their intellectual clarity. A woman writer, Jiang Xue, has this to say about the practice of history in communist China: “Mao. He said we should rewrite history. But history has happened. If it’s a novel, you can rewrite it. But if it’s history, how can you rewrite it? Anyone with a conscience will reject rewritten history.”

Another character, a male journalist named Zhang Shihe, said he writes as he does “because I’m one of those people who gets really angry when he sees something, I have to speak up”. A third, the academic, Chen Hongguo, ironically asks: “Are the politics of our era ‘when madmen lead the blind?’”

And finally, here is Jiang Xue again, responding to a friend who told her that her work was pointless and irrelevant and could have no impact in a tightly-controlled dictatorship such as communist China: “But I disagree. It matters if you try. I want to be a normal person in an abnormal society. I want to be able to say truthful things and express what’s in my heart.”

This article first appeared on The Telegraph.

Ramachandra Guha’s latest work, The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir, has just been released. His email address is ramachandraguha@yahoo.in.