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PLA soldiers are seen before a giant screen as Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks at the military parade marking the 70th founding anniversary of People's Republic of China, on its National Day in Beijing, China October 1, 2019.
Xi Jinping goes full 1984
"Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past."
That slogan laid out the Party's sinister ploy to entrench itself in power by rewriting history in George Orwell's classic novel 1984. And it's what the ruling Communist Party now wants to do in China, where "Big Brother" Xi Jinping already oversees an authoritarian techno-surveillance state that in many ways exceeds the intrusion of Orwell's dystopian future.
The CCP's inner sanctum is in Beijing this week to hold its annual closed-door meeting. But this time it's done something rare by announcing one item on the agenda: an official resolution to revise China's historical narrative under its reign, to reflect Xi's take on the "correct" interpretation of party history — and by extension China's.
What the party comes up with won't just be an anodyne internal document only CCP nerds will obsess over. Xi's historical revision will influenceeverything in China — from foreign policy, to what's taught in schools or shown on TV and in films, to what constitutes the ultimate crime of disloyalty to the party — for an entire generation, if not longer.
From Mao, to Deng, to Xi. We've known for some time that Xi is the most influential Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping, and arguably since Mao Zedong. Prior to Xi, only they have been able to rewrite the party's narrative arc on their own terms throughout the CCP's 100-year history.
Mao did it in 1945 to become the party's undisputed leader, then won the civil war and called all the shots for three decades. Deng did it in 1981 to call out Mao's excesses in the Great Leap Foward and Cultural Revolution, and to justify risky reforms that later turned China into an economic juggernaut.
Very soon Xi will forever be at their level. By drawing a direct historical line to him from Mao and Deng, the resolution will give Xi the ultimate CCP street cred he needs to guide China in the direction he wants.
In 2021, Xi is tinkering with China's past — and present — to pilot its future. He's cast himself as the natural heir to heavyweights Mao and Deng, without breaking with either to take something from both.
The saying goes that Mao made China stand up (a phrase he's famous for yet never actually uttered), and Deng made China get rich. The next step is for Xi to build on their legacies to make China "strong" — a superpower in its own right.
Wait, why does Xi even need to do this if he's already super powerful? After all, he's crushed all dissent within the party, gone after tech titans who were getting too rich, lifted presidential term limits, and now has Chinese kids studying how Xi "thinks."
In the near term, though, Xi cannot afford even a quibble as he embarks on his big plans to transform China. If no one questioned Mao or Deng when they were at the peak of their power, Xi must ensure no one will dare challenge him if he says, for example, that the Chinese economy must grow a bit less in order to become a more equal society. Or when the party decides next year whether Xi can "run" for an unprecedented third term in office.
What's more, Xi knows that as a "transformative" leader he won't even need a formal title to still be the big boss after he eventually steps down. (Fun fact: in the 1990s Deng wielded more influence behind the scenes as the head of China's bridge association than Jiang Zemin as president.)
Still, we've learned from recent Chinese history that rewriting it can have unintended consequences. Each time the party has reviewed its past, it also set in motion other stuff that almost broke its grip on power: Mao's Great Leap Forward caused the worst famine in history, and Deng's economic reforms led to a pro-democracy movement that shook the CCP to its core until it was brutally suppressed on the streets of Tiananmen in 1989.
Whatever China's all-powerful leader has in mind for the immediate future, many things could go south. A miscalculation on Taiwan, a financial crash if the real estate sector collapses, or failing on his zero-COVID strategy could all backfire — and Xi will be on the hook.In 1989, China Chose a Future That We Are Now Living In
Thirty years ago today, the Chinese government ordered soldiers to open fire on students and blue-collar workers who had taken over Tiananmen square in central Beijing to demand more political freedom and less corruption. Nobody knows how many people were killed, but estimates run into the thousands.
It wasn't a foregone conclusion that things would end in bloodshed. In the years leading up to Tiananmen, as China's planned economy flagged, the country's leadership was divided between a faction that viewed political liberalization as a prerequisite for needed economic reforms, and a group of stodgier party elders who saw any political concessions as suicidal for the regime.
Across the border in the Soviet Union, of course, Mikhail Gorbachev was struggling with the same questions. But while Gorbachev chose to liberalize the political system to try to force the Soviet bureaucracy to enact economic reform, China's Deng Xiaoping chose differently.
By ordering the massacre of Tiananmen protesters and their sympathizers in hundreds of other cities, Deng solidified a gamble that has shaped China ever since: that a repressive one-party state could co-exist with an increasingly open economy that integrated with the world.
Deng's gamble paid off. While we can't know whether a different outcome in Tiananmen would have yielded a different economic result, we do know that China's achievements since then are astounding. In 1990, China accounted for less than 4 percent of the global economy – today that figure is closer to 20 percent. Around the time of Tiananmen Square, two-thirds of China's population lived in poverty, according to the World Bank. Now it's less than 1 percent. An economy that was just a bit larger than Italy's then is the world's second largest today.
China didn't do this alone, of course. Beijing both rode, and shaped, the wave of globalization that swept the world in the 1990s. At first, China became the world's factory as hundreds of millions of people moved from the countryside into the cities providing low-cost labor for factories. Those people then became the world's largest consumer class, fueling global growth.
But the party's success in maintaining political power and economic growth has generated a backlash that shapes the world we live in today.
On one level, you see it in the rise of populist-nationalist politics in Europe and the United States, where studies have shown that regions that lost jobs to Chinese competition during the 2000s tend to vote for Donald Trump, Brexit, or other anti-establishment parties today. Here's a recent one. But more broadly, the soaring success of China's model has also produced a backlash from the US and European governments, which increasingly view Beijing as a rival that champions a competing (government-dominated) political and economic system. That's a growing contest for global power that will shape the coming decades.
"June Fourth," the China scholar Andrew Nathan has written, "was a clash between alternative futures." The decisions that China's leaders made about what to do with all those protesting students set China on a path toward the central international role it plays today.
In short, we're now living in the future that Deng Xiaoping chose for all of us 30 years ago.- Graphic Truth: China Since Tiananmen - GZERO Media ›
- Two Tiananmen Mysteries: Tank Man and Xi's Wife - GZERO Media ›
- The Battle for Control of Tiananmen - GZERO Media ›