Who Gets To Tell Chinas Story?
In early 1990, one of China's most prominent dissidents sat with his wife and son in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and watched their country tremble in violence. Last June, authorities suppressed student protests in Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds and sending many more into exile. Van Lisi fled to the embassy and waited for an agreement to be reached allowing him to leave.
In deep despair, Fang wrote “Chinese Amnesia,” an essay explaining why tragedies continue to plague China. He said the Chinese Communist Party controls history so deeply that the vast majority of people are unaware of the endless cycles of violence. As a result, people only knew what they personally experienced, making them vulnerable to the CCP's ideological campaigns: “Therefore, the true face of history is completely erased from the memory of Chinese society about once every ten years.” “The goal of Chinese communist policy is to forget history.”
For many China analysts today, Fang's view of China has become dominant. They claim that the party's control over history is stronger than ever because it now has the support of a more powerful technocratic state led by a leader wholly committed to erasing the past. Meanwhile, a vast surveillance state monitors anyone with alternative views about the past and present. China's amnesia seems to be complete.
However, this position is wrong. Fang aptly described China as it was in the early 1990s . But after a few years this model of historical extinction began to collapse. The main reason is the growing movement of citizen historians who have successfully challenged the Party's control of history. At the heart of their efforts are two essential digital technologies that we often take for granted: PDFs and digital cameras. Because it is so ubiquitous in modern life, it is easy to overlook it, yet it has radically changed the way historical memory is preserved and disseminated in authoritarian states like China. They allow people to retrieve banned or out-of-print books and create new editions without printing presses or copiers. It also frees filmmakers from bulky and expensive equipment that previously only television and film studios could afford. The result was a torrent of books, magazines, and films spanning two decades, created on laptops and transmitted over long distances via email, file transfers, and memory cards.
These tools have proven to be modern weapons of the weak, allowing a group of people to rise up and challenge the government based on its main source of legitimacy: the mythical story of history. In its storied party history, the Chinese Communist Party came to power in the mid-20th century to save China, and continues to rule the country thanks in large part to its pristine history. By promoting this narrative, the party enjoys enormous advantages, including a monopoly on television, film, publishing, and school programs. However, this has not stopped citizen historians from challenging the state today, under Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has made mastery of history one of his core principles.
Events such as last year's protests against the coronavirus lockdown and economic downturn show how large groups of Chinese can acknowledge past favoritism by the government. Government propagandists can flood the media with their version of reality or suppress unwanted information. This sophisticated form of censorship means that most people still agree with the government's version of events. However, enough people now have access to alternative explanations to create widespread and persistent doubts about the government. The Party's tough efforts to control history demonstrate the strength of this uprising, which Xi sees as a life-and-death battle that the Party must win at all costs.
Complete replacement
Since the era of Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist Party has used myths to explain the recent past. The worst disaster in the history of the People's Republic was the Great Famine of 1959-1961, which killed up to 45 million people, about twenty times the number who died during the Cultural Revolution. But it is officially assumed that only a few million people died in the “three difficult years” and that only because of natural disasters and the withdrawal of Soviet advisors. In other words: the party is flawless. However, this distorted view of history is rejected by almost all major historians at home and abroad, let alone the people who lived it. They know that the famine was caused by Mao's misguided economic policies, which forced farmers into large-scale agricultural and industrial strategies that destroyed perennial crops.
However, until recently, this discrepancy was not a major problem for the Party, because it produced only fragments of links: some people might know that the Party's version was wrong, but most people only know the Party's report. But unofficial Chinese historians have rejected the party's version of events at several key turning points during the CCP's nearly 75-year rule. These include the 1940s and 1950s massacres of nobles who once lived a rural life (what the party calls a campaign against “landowners”), the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen massacre, and most recently coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). ). . 19 pieces.
One of the cornerstones of this movement against history is a 1960 student magazine called Iskra . It was founded by students who participated in the campaign against the Chinese educated class in the 1950s and were exiled to western China. There they saw firsthand the effects of the Great Famine: cannibalism, mass starvation, and officials who were too afraid of Mao to tell the truth. They founded the magazine in the hope of stirring up resistance to one-party rule by publishing articles against tyranny, the lack of freedom of expression, and the helplessness of the Chinese peasantry.
Digital technologies have radically changed the way historical memory is preserved and disseminated.
However, shortly after Spark's publication, the authorities halted its publication and confiscated all copies of the magazine. 43 people were arrested. Three of them were executed and the rest were sent to labor camps. After Mao's death in 1976 and the rise to power of relatively moderate forces, the party made partial adjustments to the excesses committed at that time. Some people were allowed to view their personal files, or dangan , a file the state keeps on each person that contains everything from high school grades to police records. One of the students involved in the magazine, Tang Zhanshui, was able to review her files in the 1980s and saw that the authorities - in good bureaucratic fashion - had kept copies of everything that had been used to convict her. It contained copies of the magazine, confessions from all the students, and even love letters she had written to her boyfriend, who was the driving force behind the magazine and who was executed in 1970.
Tan took all the materials away, but they remained in his apartment for years. Then came the 1990s, when friends used images to create PDF files. This led to Spark being relaunched in a digital format and allowed people to learn about the students' sharp criticism of the one-party government. It also allowed people to share hundreds of pages of student police documents, inspiring independent Chinese filmmakers, journalists, and public intellectuals to produce films, write books, and provide commentary on the students and their magazine. Memories that were once personal became collective – not for all Chinese, but for a large number of people, many of whom were highly educated and influential.
Over the past two decades, the discovery of the past and the creation of new historical knowledge have occurred many times. Now, hundreds of books questioning the party's past are widely available online, while videographers are producing ambitious documentaries and oral histories to preserve votes that would once have been lost.
Learn to speak
One way to understand China's changing relationship with historical memory is to study one of the greatest Chinese writers of the past half-century, Wang Xiaobo.
Wang was deeply influenced by his wife Li Yinhe, considered one of China's leading sexual experts. She has researched and written about the gay and lesbian movement in China and has been an advocate for transgender and bisexual people in recent years. They met in 1979 and married the following year. In 1984, the couple enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, where Li earned his doctorate and Wang earned his master's degree. When they returned to China in 1988, Li eventually took a position at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, while Wang taught history and sociology at Renmin University and Peking University.
During the 1989 student movement, Wang remained silent about the protests. He was damaged by the Cultural Revolution and was unsure of the amorphous movement. Who ran it? What were their goals? Like many of his generation, he was afraid of large, and sometimes chaotic, movements. Silence became the subject of Wang's most famous essay, "The Silent Majority." Wang described how the Mao era silenced people with the all-encompassing presence of the great leader: His thoughts, ideas, and words flowed day and night. This left a scar that meant something to Wang: “I couldn't trust those who belonged to the language communities.” The struggle to find a voice became a personal endeavor for Wang and a symbol for China as a whole.
This is what prompted Wang to study gay communities in China. Disadvantaged groups remained silent. They were deprived of their rights. Sometimes society even denied its existence. Then Wang had an epiphany: a large section of Chinese society was voiceless, not just transgender people, but also students, farmers, immigrants, miners, people living in historic urban areas slated for demolition, and so on. These were not just members of a few interest groups, but were representatives of a large portion of Chinese society. “These people are silent for various reasons,” he wrote. “Some because they do not have the ability or ability to speak, others because they are hiding something, and others because, for whatever reason, they feel some aversion to the world of language.” “As one of them, it is my duty to speak out about what I saw and heard,” he added.
Indeed, Wang was shocked by the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and questioned his failure to support the protesters. But he came to believe that the protesters, though noble, represented an old way of doing things that he could no longer support. They saw themselves as classical intellectuals who wanted to influence the state and were upset at being ignored. Wang saw society differently. In his view, its main problem was the division into groups too weak to resist the excessive power of the one-party state. This is why China has remained silent. He eventually realized that he had to write about these groups and not become another privileged intellectual.
from zero
Wang became a prominent public intellectual who wrote widely for Chinese media. Although he died of a heart attack just five years later, in 1997, at the age of 44, he influenced an entire generation of people. One of these is feminist scholar and film director Ai Xiaoming, whose films focus on disadvantaged groups in Chinese society such as farmers, rape victims, and labor camp inmates. Others, such as writers Yan Liangqi and Liao Yu, also began to depict the most vulnerable members of society, such as prisoners and victims of the Mao era. Jia Changke, one of China's greatest filmmakers, often cites Wang as the writer who inspired him to tell individual stories rather than the collective narratives favored by the state.
Wang himself was influenced by many thinkers. As a young man growing up in Mao's China, he secretly read the works of Bertrand Russell and absorbed his ideas about personal freedom. In Pittsburgh he also read Michel Foucault and his description of power relations between the individual and the state. In addition to the influence of Wang's thought, Foucault is also useful in explaining Wang's role in Chinese society. Foucault describes how intellectuals moved from considering classical universal topics – freedom, morality, existence – to specific areas in which they had specialized knowledge. This expertise allows them to intervene effectively in public debates, often on behalf of vulnerable groups such as the poor, migrants or people living with HIV/AIDS.
In the West it started in the mid-20th century, but in China it only became possible with the digital revolution. In the decade after Wang's death, citizen historians lived not only on PDF files and cheap digital cameras, but also for several years on the relatively free Internet. This has allowed blogs, message boards and social media to flourish, providing a platform for many of these informal voices.
The rise of Xi Jinping was part of a reaction against this era of openness. Party members attacked rebels, NGOs, and political discussions. But one of his main interests was the control of history. In 2013, Xi Jinping banned criticism of the Mao era. In 2016, he purged the leading anti-historical journal China Through the Ages , even though his father Xi Zhongxun, a senior official, had strongly supported him. In 2021, the Chinese government rewrote its guidelines for presenting history, further obscuring major events such as the Cultural Revolution.
But despite increasing efforts to control the past, the work of citizen historians continues. While some of the most prominent, such as directors Ai and Hu Jie, have been put on trial, others continue to work. Remembrance , the most influential secret history magazine, has been published continuously in PDF format since 2008; The 245th edition was recently published.
It is no coincidence that among these “popular intellectuals” it is easier to find female voices such as Ai, the poet Lin Zhao, and the writer Jiang Xue, as well as minority voices such as the detained Uighur intellectual Ilham Tohti and the Tibetan poet. Tsering phaser. Voices like hers were often excluded from mainstream circles, coming from the Confucian tradition of male-dominated ethnic Chinese intellectuals, or from the masculine world of established Chinese novelists. In his essay on his personal journey, Wang described another difference from the world of traditional social thinkers. Urban intellectuals and historians did not follow the Confucian tradition with its often preferential interest in land or people, but were motivated to act for personal reasons. “Above all, I want to lift myself up,” he writes. "It's despicable. And it's also selfish. And that's true, too."
Wang shares this motivation with other fundamental thinkers. Journalist and historian Yang Jisheng watched his adoptive father starve during the Great Famine and made documenting the terrible turmoil his life's work. Vlogger Tiger Temple was a slave laborer on the railways in the 1960s and later decided to document the story. I saw how women are oppressed. Jiang learned of his grandfather's death from starvation and began investigating the famine. Recently, many have been affected by the government's mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and have begun documenting their experiences. This response can be seen as narrow or limited, but as Wang realized, societies also change in this way: people try to understand and describe their own lives.
Chinese citizens may increasingly question official narratives about their country's past.
The influence of these secret historians can be measured in two ways. One of these reasons is the government's desire to eliminate them. People often believe that authoritarian leaders have infinite political capital. In fact, they have to choose their battles. Xi's decision to make mastering history one of his top priorities shows that he believes this is important. In his speeches, he publicly opposed the Soviet Union's trends in the 1980s, when leader Mikhail Gorbachev allowed criticism of the party's history as part of his policy of propaganda and openness. Xi said that by allowing criticism of the history of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev's actions led to the ideological destruction of the country. According to Xi Jinping's analysis, this is the main reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union and why the Chinese Communist Party must destroy unofficial historians.
The recent protests against the White Paper show that these undercurrents can have political consequences and represented the biggest problem for the Tiananmen Party in 1989. During this period, writers like Jiang gained widespread popularity on Chinese social media. Early in his career, he wrote a major article for Spark magazine and other material dealing with the unrest of Central and Eastern European populations during the Cold War. His works in 2022 and 2023 based on this experience were excluded from censorship, but have been published and edited hundreds of times.
With China facing difficult problems on many fronts – slow growth, demographic problems, and a tense foreign policy – events like the White Paper protests may not be exceptions, but they are harbingers of new and unstable times. But they also believe that ordinary Chinese citizens may be increasingly willing to challenge official narratives about their country's past and develop a new understanding of the forces shaping the country's present and future.
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