Still, at 100 years old, the Communist Party will have much to celebrate: after 30 disastrous years under Mao, Deng Xiaoping’s opening to foreign investment and global markets laid the ground for decades of growth and made possible Xi’s vision of China’s “great rejuvenation”.

Yet it is interesting to speculate what the twelve delegates, among them the young Mao Zedong, who met a century ago in Shanghai to found the CCP would make of today’s China. With the country’s New Year celebrations starting today, Mao, we can be fairly certain, would not be amused: he spent the last two decades of his life trying to prevent Deng Xiaoping from coming to power, accusing him, not unreasonably as it turned out, of wanting to “take the capitalist road”. But what of the other revolutionaries, men for whom Confucius was the despised symbol of everything that was wrong with traditional, imperial China, who dreamed of a society in which class divisions had ceased to exist and who proposed “liberation” and independence for Xinjiang, Tibet and Mongolia?

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Will China's millennials ever rebel?

By Mary Harrington

They would be pleased, no doubt, that China was stronger and wealthier, and that the era of western colonialism was over. But what would they make of the country’s wealth distribution, which a century later is among the most unequal in the world? Or that the current Communist Party leadership, while proclaiming “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, also promotes Confucius and invokes the glories of its imperial history as a source of its own legitimacy?

In another speech last December, this one to celebrate 40 years since the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, Xi repeated the most common, and questionable, claim about that history. “To promote reform and development in China — a large country with a more than 5,000-year history of civilisation and more than 1.3bn people — there is no textbook that can be regarded as a golden rule, and there is no great master who can dictate to the Chinese people,” he said.

His appeal to China’s uniquely ancient calling card is one frequently repeated by visiting foreign dignitaries and business leaders — some, perhaps, because they know no better, others because they understand that making money in China is easier with a smile from above. It is also at the core of Chinese exceptionalism promoted by Xi and all who seek to please him: we are the world’s oldest continuing civilisation and that will never change.

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From there it is an easy step to say that these unique characteristics allow the country to make its own rules, and to question them is a hostile act. No so-called “universal principles”  — let alone human rights —  can get in the way of that story. How could they, given China’s serene and unbroken accumulation of wisdom over more than five millennia?

These claims are, of course, historical nonsense. The China of today bears little resemblance to that of the past. Put to one side the fact that the Great Wall, commonly thought of as a defensive fortification against invasion by the intermittently dangerous steppe peoples, is puzzlingly located today in the middle of the map of China. A glance at any historical atlas reveals that the Ming Dynasty borders (1388-1644) enclosed a country that was half the size of its current “immutable” version. Turning the pages further back reveals a pattern of continually shifting boundaries and frequent divisions.

So why does the Chinese Communist Party insist upon its alternative history so strenuously? The answer, I suspect, lies in the fracture of the country’s imperial model in the early 20^th century, as well as the new ideas, such as Marxism, that took hold among intellectuals and revolutionaries as they struggled to imagine a different polity. In their attempt to define post-imperial China, these revolutionaries had to grapple with the question of what, in the absence of an emperor to whom all loyalties could be directed, was the big idea that would hold this huge and diverse former empire together.

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Don't mess with China's feminists

By Qi Chen

Reformers were calling for science and democracy, but first there had to be a clear idea of what China was, what it would be called and — given the vast diversity of languages, loyalties and cultures — what common appeal could be offered to people who identified with their province but lacked the sense of China as a nation state.

In the end, they looked less to history for their answers than to western writings on race, eugenics and social Darwinism. The outcomes were not always pretty, and strong racial influences still underscore the way the state defines China and who belongs there. Some drew lines around peoples who did not share their language or culture, and claimed both them and the territory of the collapsed Manchu empire as innately “Chinese ” on spurious genetic grounds.

Yet all this was far from a given. After all, it was Sun Yatsen, the country’s first president, who said: “The Kuomintang (Nationalist Party)… recognises the right of self-determination of all national minorities in China and it will organise a free and united Chinese republic.” And the Communist Party went further, first calling for a federated republic, then, in Article 14 of its first constitution in 1931, stating that the national minorities of China — from the Mongolians to the Tibetans — had the “right to complete separation from China and to the formation of an independent state of each national minority.” It continued: “They may either join the Union of Chinese Soviets or secede from it and form their own state as they may prefer.”

That promise did not last. Today, the party insists that all those territories that could have been independent under the terms of the 1931 constitution have “always” been part of China. In fact, it claims, these regions had only been granted a highly qualified “autonomy” that promised cultural and language rights and a nominally autonomous government. The Party was always in command.

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And this message was particularly important following the death of Mao Zedong and, later, the crushing of the student-led occupation of Tiananmen Square in 1989. A new national story was needed and history was pressed into service. Instead of a socialist paradise tomorrow, the party offered the memory of a past greatness cruelly stolen by rapacious foreigners. Only the party, they said, could prevent that from happening again. That story, coupled with rising living standards, more or less held the line until 2012, when Xi became President.

Today, however, living standards are rising less rapidly and that national story again needs a refresh. Xi Jinping’s revision, accompanied by a re-centralisation of power in the party and himself, is that western democracies are decadent and that China’s model — drawn from Marx, yes, but resting on those accumulated 5000 years of wisdom — will emerge triumphant.

In this new narrative, the essential requirement of belonging in the rejuvenated China is to love the Party; a 21^st-century version of the imperial idea that allowed barbarians to consider themselves “hua” — civilised — if they embraced the superior culture. In today’s version, however, loyalty is the most important factor. In China’s new national story, assimilation is the only option.

Well, happy birthday Civ. Mind you, Civilization is, by some metrics, older than civilisation. In the preface to Sid Meier’s new book Sid Meier’s Memoir!, the game’s creator notes that player data from the online gaming platform Steam shows that between 2010 and 2016 gamers spent a billion hours playing Civilization V (only one game in a series that spans 12 editions). A billion hours ago, he notes by way of giving the figure some perspective, neanderthals were making spearheads in the Stone Age. Or, as it would appear in the game, unlocking a new technology.

In Civ terms, 29 years is a blip, but — call me sentimental — I think its birthday deserves celebrating. One of the great things about Civ was that, rather than fannying around with barrel-throwing apes or bleeping space-aliens, it asked its players to contemplate human life itself. It asked us — in however schematic a way — to think about us: that is, about politics, economics, science, ideology, war, and about the way in which these things interact and mingle through history.

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What Dungeons and Dragons taught me about politics

By James Kirkup

Here was a game that, starting round 4000BC, plonked a handful of nomadic hunter-gatherer types in the middle of a map. All around them was fog and mystery. And you, the player, in loco dei, told them what to do. They’d found a city. They’d tentatively explore the surrounding terrain. They’d raise armies, develop primitive and then more sophisticated technologies, build ports and cultivate crops, and encounter neighbouring tribes with whom they’d negotiate, trade and sometimes go to war.

It was the full package. You won the game, finally, by taking over the world or escaping it — but there were many different routes to those ends. Perhaps you developed the tech to send colonists to Alpha Centauri. Perhaps you established a global free-trading network and dominated through soft power and diplomacy in the United Nations. Or perhaps you went full Alexander the Great and wiped out all the rival civilisations on the map, weeping, finally, because there were no more worlds to conquer — at least until the release of the next expansion pack.

And that, I think, is the key to its appeal. It offers the idea that there are parameters and trade-offs in the way civilisations develop; that you can establish vicious and virtuous circles as you manage limited resources. It lets you tinker with those parameters — just as governments tinker with those parameters in the real world. Will state aid to tech firms help you “level up” the regions? Is it better to be bound to your neighbours by treaties and trade, or to go your own way? These are the sorts of questions that Civ asks you to consider. (And in Civ, you don’t condemn hundreds of thousands of real people to destitution if you fuck it up.)

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Why I'm reactivating World of Warcraft

By Sam Leith

To those who think videogames have nothing to teach us, Civ and games like it are a standing reproach. There is a moment in Steven Johnson’s influential book about pop culture, Everything Bad Is Good For You, for example, where the author describes watching his seven-year-old nephew playing SimCity. The boy says offhandedly: “I think we need to lower our industrial tax rates.” Here, God help us, is a budding Chicago School economist not yet out of short trousers.

The game proved irresistibly addictive. We could measure its success not only in hours played but in starker and more dismaying statistics such as the number of PhDs deferred or grades slipped at A-level, the number of marriages soured and hours of sleep lost to people playing just a few more turns until, say, they’d seen off Genghis Khan or got the Pyramids built.

Of course, the model of history in Civ is very far from precise. The basic architecture of the original game was, as Meier puts it, “a reasonably clear progression through anarchy, despotism, monarchy, communism, republic, and finally democracy”. Anthropologists and historians would tend to have quibbled with that even back in the early 90s with Fukuyama in his pomp; let alone amid our current global trolley-dash towards despotism and autarchy. And religion as a mechanism of social control (and its opposite) didn’t make its debut until Civ IV — a couple of years after the attacks on the World Trade Center.

The need for it to be an enjoyable videogame also required certain other, sometimes drastic, simplifications. As Meyer says in his memoir, they toyed with undermining the set-up’s basically Whiggish teleology by including a mechanic that modelled the cyclical rise and fall of empires, but “the moment the Krakatoa volcano blew up, or the bubonic plague came marching through, all anyone wanted to do was reload from a saved game”. So it goes.

But the point was that Civ wasn’t claiming to model the history that actually happened — it was inviting you to create your own, and in the process to think about the sorts of thing that determine how  history goes. As Meyer writes: “It didn’t matter […] that gunpowder was originally developed for medicinal purposes in China — what mattered is that you, as a civilization, could have discovered it any time after the perfection of iron smelting. You were rewriting history, not reliving it.”

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Want to make sense of our chaotic world?

By Sam Leith

And sometimes, the history it modelled was exquisitely resonant. The average game of Civ II, for instance, was supposed to last about 10 hours — but one player called James Moore, his game having arrived at a three-way state of aggressive equilibrium between the Celts, the Vikings and the Americans, kept playing for 10 years.

In the game, as Meier describes it, the three civilisations were “continuously pelting each-other with nuclear warheads while never losing or gaining substantial ground”…”centuries of conflict killed 90% of the population, and nuclear fallout melted the polar ice-caps more than twenty times […] After 1,700 years of nonstop thermonuclear bombing, the rising oceans in James’s world had covered all but the highest mountain regions with swamps.”

So not only does Civ encourage us to think about the way the world really wags — and, gently, to suggest that relations between sister nations need not be a zero-sum game. It also tells us, or warns us, that things could be an awful lot worse. Here’s to it.