He is not so mighty yet that he is above fear; nay, doubt ever gnaws him
J R R Tolkien, “The Lord of the Rings”
100 years ago, the first step was taken on the road to tens of millions of deaths and decades of misery for nearly ¼ of humanity.
It was on July 1, 1921, that an obscure, middle-class, dilettante student named Mao Zedong and 12 others founded the Chinese Communist Party. The rest is history: bloody, brutal, horrific history.
Naturally, the CCP is gearing up to celebrate the centenary of its founding in grand fashion. Equally naturally, they’re lying through their teeth about their history.
The obscure Shanghai courtyard of 1921 is now a lavish memorial hall, a focal point as China celebrates the centenary on Thursday of the party that controls the world’s most populous nation and second-biggest economy.
The site of that first party congress now chronicles China’s “humiliation” at the hands of warlords and imperialists, its “awakening” in the early 20th century and its revival after the party’s 1949 victory in a civil war that sent Chiang Kai-shek‘s nationalists into exile in Taiwan.
And immediately plunged the country into a whirlwind of violence and starvation, as the Party worked to systematically destroy the foundations of traditional Chinese life. Almost the entire country was subsumed by a whirlwind of torture and brutality. People were deliberately turned against one another, under the threat of torture and execution, with the explicit goal of making everyone complicit in the CCP’s cruelty.
As Mao calmly ordered quotas of killings in every province and city, he also made sure that the entire population had blood on their hands. It was an horrific and deliberate policy of yoking the people to the Party by shared guilt.
But you won’t hear any of that. Not from Beijing.
Even as China celebrates, it erases.
A stirring video montage highlights China’s proudest achievements, including its first atomic bomb, the construction of prestige infrastructure and the recent unmanned mission to Mars.
Millions died and millions more were brutalised in the first decade of communist rule. That was just the warm-up.
Nine years after the founding of the communist People’s Republic of China, Mao launched the horror of the Great Leap Forward. Although the exact death toll is shrouded in secrecy, historians estimated that at least 45 million people died in the next four years. It has been dubbed the greatest man-made famine and act of mass-murder in human history.
If that wasn’t enough, in 1966, Mao unleashed the madness of the Cultural Revolution. Over the next ten years, millions more died as the country descended into virtual civil war. Aside from the deaths, it’s estimated that three-quarters of China’s millennia of cultural history was smashed and burned as “old ways of thinking” by Mao’s Red Guards. Temples, books, tombs – even the grave of Confucius – were vandalised and destroyed.
The crackdowns and murders never wholly ceased. From Tiananmen Square to Xinjiang to Hong Kong, in the words of John Anderson, “In the end, a communist will behave as a communist does”.
“There’s a lot of its history (the party) needs to forget,” said Robert Bickers, a historian of the party at Britain’s University of Bristol. “It has devoted a great deal of effort throughout the course of its 100 years ensuring that there is an agreed text of a history that needs to be celebrated”[…]
The party has long sought to control history. That effort has intensified under Xi, who has spearheaded a campaign against “historical nihilism”, defined as any attempt to use the past to question the party’s leading role or the “inevitability” of Chinese socialism.
MSN
Despite China’s “wolf warrior” grandstanding, though, the Party, especially its leader, Xi Xinping, lives in constant insecurity. The stark lesson of the collapse of the Soviet Union haunts Beijing.
If once Beijing were forced to tell the truth about its horrific past, its devil’s deal with its own population would collapse. That prospect clearly haunts the Party, no matter how much of a show of strength and triumphalism it puts on.
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