In the West, information has a habit of wanting to be free. Every so often, government documents are recalled, or a court order prevents an issue from being discussed — but once the material is out in the public sphere, especially online, it is generally very hard to retract it. Since this is the norm for liberal societies, we sometimes underestimate how important it is to keep bodies of knowledge free and accessible to the public.

In today’s illiberal China, by contrast, we see what happens when the preservation of information for the public is less important than protecting the ruling system. The Chinese government is determined to prove it can be made to disappear at the snap of its fingers. In March, it was announced that large parts of CNKI, the major Chinese research and academic database, were being closed to overseas readers. The Chinese insist that this is just tit for tat, as it’s harder for their own researchers to get access to Western research databases. But that’s disingenuous. It’s true that there are now security-linked restrictions on some researchers from China getting access to Western hi-tech labs. Yet Chinese historians, political scientists and sociologists still have easy and convenient access to sources in the West, such as the UK National Archives.

Foreign academics studying China aren’t nearly so lucky. Overseas access to China’s historical materials — particularly those from the turbulent years of Mao Zedong’s rule — is now off-limits. This wasn’t always the case: a number of key archives including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were open to foreign and domestic scholars during the first decade of this century, allowing for astonishing insights into the formation of Mao’s foreign policy (and, as it happens, helping China to make its current foreign policy more legible to the world). Then, in 2012, most of the collection was closed off again. No single explanation was given other than a cryptic “zhengli” (reordering or tidying up), but in retrospect, it marked the start of a decade of narrowing boundaries for academic and political discussion as Xi Jinping tightened his control over China.

Suggested reading

Has Xi Jinping bankrupted China?

By Edward Luttwak

The closing of archives might seem like a rather specialist complaint. But the wider issue — the illusion that once information is out in the open, it remains there — is more fundamental to the behaviour of writers, thinkers, and societies as a whole than the liberal world sometimes realises. China’s intellectuals have to reckon not just with the battle to get material out in the open, but the reality that any victory may be temporary, and the door may narrow or close again.

Consider the writing of Wang Xiaobo, a well-known Chinese novelist in the Eighties and Nineties. Unsure what to make of his wry and ironic fiction, the authorities first banned his work, then allowed it to be published in the relatively more liberal atmosphere of the mid-Nineties (though it has been only sporadically available in China since then). Wang’s story is neither unique nor particularly tragic: it is often the case in China that the same artist is both feted and censored. But his story is illustrative of the way that information and access come and go in China, a phenomenon that shapes attitudes towards reality.

In China, collective knowledge and memory are fragile. To give them more substance and staying power, Chinese intellectuals have come up with two different techniques. The first is to embrace the ironies surrounding the ephemerality of the written word. Wang’s most widely-known novel, Golden Age, now in a new translation for Penguin Classics by Yan Yan, is an account of the Cultural Revolution: the decade from 1966 to 1976 when China was racked by an internal civil war instigated by Mao in an act of purgative revenge against his own Communist Party, which he believed was sidelining him.

Suggested reading

The West and China share the same fate

By N.S. Lyons

Yet Wang’s book doesn’t offer the kind of grand narrative sweep present in Jung Chang’s Wild Swans and other bestselling memoirs of the Cultural Revolution. Instead, it opens with a “sent-down youth” named Wang Er, a young man exiled to the countryside during Mao’s political storm. During his time in the village, he has a long on-off affair with a young female doctor until the two of them are discovered and forced to self-criticise. This tactic of demanding that political offenders recount their own “crimes” was a standard part of the project of ideological purification from the Forties onwards. But rather than going through a violent and painful humiliation typical of the Cultural Revolution, the wayward couple is simply made to write confessions of their Orwellian “sexcrimes”. The cadre in charge of monitoring the confessions seems to enjoy them for their prurient detail rather than seeking to use them for reforming the recidivists.

For much of the novel, Wang depicts this strange parallel Cultural Revolution, far removed from the violence in the cities. It is only later that we find out that the anti-hero has been witness to a horrific confrontation when he gives an understated but devastating account of a teacher who is persecuted until he throws himself from the window, and whose family are left standing on the ground next to scattered pieces of his brain. Like much of the writing of post-1949 history in China, Golden Age only makes sense when the missing elements are added in late in the day.

This mixture of irony and violence is not the kind of thing that the Party tends to favour. The Cultural Revolution is not completely off limits for discussion in China, but it’s hard to talk about it in tones that suggest it was anything other than a terrible historical error — the fault of a few erring leaders — that the Party itself successfully corrected, and that it’s time to move on. Wang’s approach, in contrast, implies that the wounds of that time have never really healed. That bleak interpretation must be one of the reasons that the book was illicit (though widely read).

Suggested reading

Has the West lost control of oil?

By Helen Thompson

Chinese writers today face even greater challenges than Wang. As Megan Walsh points out in her book, The Subplot, popular fiction is now written at high speed online, and is highly commercial, bringing in the kind of income that many Substackers can only dream of. Yet online readers can suddenly find their favourite epic blocked by censors. Unlike Wang’s physical novels, which could at least be hidden in private libraries during times of harsh censorship, today’s bestselling fiction can disappear overnight. Just because you read something today doesn’t mean you’ll find it tomorrow, whether it’s a historical document about the Cultural Revolution or a multi-part fiction series about lesbian martial arts champions. Fiction flickers on the screen: you have to catch it while you can.

This leads us to the second way that some seek to preserve memory, as illustrated in Ian Johnson’s new book Sparks, which gives a highly empathetic account of the way that China’s historical community gets around the rules that prevent the preservation of documentation and restrain historical analysis. The fate of the journal China Through the Ages (Yanhuang Chunqiu) offers a particularly disturbing example. For decades, the journal, officially permitted as a vehicle for the more liberal strain in Chinese Communist politics, was allowed to publish documents and essays that forced attention to the darker and more complex side of Chinese Communist history, even referencing figures such as Zhao Ziyang, the former party chief placed under house arrest after Tiananmen Square in 1989. Then, in 2016, the magazine was shut down in a political purge (although it reappeared under new management). Such unpredictability means that historians have to resort to other means to preserve material: either publishing as online “newsletters” that don’t require an official publication permit, or publishing abroad. The seeming solidity of an ISBN melts into the air — even more so in an age where digital-only publications can be switched off at a moment’s notice.

Suggested reading

Inside China's fiction factories

By Megan Walsh

Today in the West, there are major, unresolved debates about how electronic data can be preserved when technology makes old formats such as CDs obsolete. There is also a growing divide between institutions and societies that can afford to keep databases switched on and those that can’t. But these choices are very different from deciding that a particular body of historical data — records of top Party leaders’ discussions; economic data about unemployment — should vanish because they are politically inconvenient. This fear of disappearance profoundly affects the way that China preserves its modern history. Libraries and even databases are still important, but the piles of printouts in a local historian’s back room, next to the rice cooker, or those videos of Cultural Revolution survivors kept on a private laptop take on a particular urgency because handing them over to an official archive could mean disappearance rather than preservation.

Wang Xiaobo died young in 1997, so we don’t know what he would have made of a 21st-century China which largely lives on the internet. He would probably have been pleased that his own books are reasonably freely available today. But he might well have been hard at work on a novel that reflected the here-today-gone-tomorrow fragility of history, fiction, and memory in today’s authoritarian China, where it is easier than ever to disseminate information and simpler than ever to cut it off.

In its officially approved history, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defeated internal enemies, vanquished imperialist powers and brought an end to China’s “Century of Humiliation”. The stains of defeat left by a series of opium wars and unequal treaties from the 1840s onwards were washed away by the revolutionary victory of 1949. The Chinese people, in the words attributed to Mao Zedong, had “stood up” and defeated colonialism.

But there’s a problem with this heroic narrative. Had it not been for colonialism and the imperial powers, there would never have been a successful Chinese Communist Party in the first place. If the sclerotic Qing Empire had not been forced to accommodate European military powers during the nineteenth century, the ideas and networks that allowed a communist movement to exist would never have been able to come together in the twentieth.

The CCP was not founded in Shanghai by accident. The first congress was held in the newly built home of one of the 15 revolutionary pioneers, Li Hanjun, at 106 Rue Wantz in what was then the French Concession. The French Concession and the neighbouring “International Settlement” (originally the British and American “concessions”) had been created because of the first of the unequal treaties: the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing following the first Opium War, under which China ceded Hong Kong to the British.

The two city districts were not formally colonies, but Chinese law did not apply there. By the early twentieth century, their combination of loose regulations and global connections had turned Shanghai into an international entrepôt. In the words of historian Tony Saich: “Shanghai was home to a nascent labour movement and its international ambience meant that not only people but also ideas flowed freely. Moreover, the foreign concessions meant that the activists could meet and conspire out of the reach of the Chinese authorities.

Suggested reading

Has China rescued the West?

By Aris Roussinos

Li Hanjun and his brother Li Shucheng had built neighbouring houses in the French concession precisely to take advantage of the opportunities provided by this imperial intrusion on China’s territory. Both were political activists and their ideas, like their homes, were constructed from a hybrid of Chinese and European styles. Preserved for its role in CCP history, 106 Rue Wantz (now 76 Xingye Road) is one of the few remaining examples of a once popular Sino-European architecture known as shikumen.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Shanghai was one of around 30 “treaty ports” around the coast of China and along the Yangzi River. All had been forced on a reluctant Qing Empire by the threat of European military force. Some were insignificant harbours while others played roles that went much wider than trade. Shanghai and Tianjin became enclaves of radicalism, centres of newspaper and book publishing that spread foreign ideas far into their hinterlands. One of the CCP’s co-founders, Chen Duxiu chose to found his magazine New Youth in Shanghai in September 1915.

These radicals were following in the footsteps of European evangelicals a couple of decades earlier. Organisations such as the Christian Literature Society had been created by Brits and Americans to spread the good news of both Jesus and Western culture throughout what they regarded as a decaying Asian empire. They founded newspapers to translate the latest ideas about science and society into Chinese. They may not have converted many Christians but they radically transformed the worldviews of a generation of reform-minded students and officials.

One of these missionaries, a Baptist from Carmarthenshire named Timothy Richard, is still remembered in the Communist Party Museum on the former site of Peking University as the first person to publish the names of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Chinese. Meanwhile, John Fryer, from Hythe in Kent, was the founder and editor of a magazine, Gezhi Huibian (known in English as the Chinese Scientific Magazine). In 1892 it published what is thought to be the first article in Chinese suggesting a division of humanity into categories based upon skin colour. These proselytisers, and many like them, helped spread ideas of evolution, social progress, racism and nationalism in the final decades of the Qing state.

Suggested reading

How to stop China's long march

By Edward Luttwak

Protected by international treaties that guaranteed them immunity from local laws, missionaries and other Westerners could preach across the country. “Extra-territoriality” allowed them to create local “study societies” in which new ideas could be introduced and debated under the noses of the authorities.

These groups and methods were copied by the leading reformists Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao with their “Self-Strengthening Study Society”. Another historian of the early years of CCP, Hans van de Ven of the University of Cambridge, has argued that it was this “infrastructure” of intellectual networks that created the foundation for the subsequent growth of radical organisations and ultimately the Communist Party itself.

Other missionaries helped to create hybrid institutions intended to reform and modernise the Qing Empire. The Rev W.A.P. Martin, who had acted as a translator for the American delegation during the negotiations for the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin, became the founding president of Peking University in 1898. Timothy Richard was the engine behind the creation of Shanxi University in 1902.

By the 1910s, Peking University was providing both the ideas, and in many cases the employment, behind the intellectual movement that gave birth to communism. Mao Zedong was the assistant librarian there, working under Li Dazhao who became the other co-founder of the CCP. By then Chen Duxiu had become head of the Literature department. Many of the other professors were key figures in the “New Culture Movement” which called for the abandonment of traditional ideas and the adoption of Western science and democracy. It was disillusionment with Western promises that led some to join the “May Fourth Movement” protests in 1919 and then to turn to communism.

In 1918, Mao and a few other students formed the “New Citizen Study Society” based on the earlier missionary-led model. Its key beliefs were also borrowed from the missionary-inspired reformist movement. Even the name — “New Citizen” — was copied from a newspaper edited by the reformist Liang Qichao who had once worked as Timothy Richard’s assistant. The missionaries, the reformists and the revolutionaries all prioritised the transmission of Western ideas to the masses.

Suggested reading

China will never stop rewriting history

By Isabel Hilton

Studying in Japan, too, was a critical element in the communist awakening, although don’t expect any mention of this from the current CCP leadership who prefer to portray Japan as a bogeyman rather than a source of enlightenment. In the half-century following 1853, when the US Navy had forced open Japan’s markets and society, the elite in Tokyo and other cities had whole-heartedly adopted Western ideas of modernisation, liberalism and nationalism. As a child in the 1900s, Li Hanjun had been sent to study in Japan and remained there for a decade. He wasn’t alone: Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu and thousands more like them lived and studied there. The ideas they acquired flowed back into China during and after the revolutionary events of the 1910s.

By the time Li Hanjun showed up in Shanghai, the foundations of what would become the CCP were falling into place. The catalyst that turned talk into action was the presence of two foreigners among the 15 delegates to the First Party Congress in Rue Wantz in July 1921. One was a Dutchman, Henricus (Henk) Sneevliet. The other was a Russian, Vladimir Nikolsky. Both attended as representatives of the Communist International: sent by Lenin to bring about revolution in East Asia.

This was just one more contribution to a globalised series of events and accidents that had unfolded without any central plan over the previous four decades. Chinese communism, just like Chinese nationalism, developed as a set of hybrid ideas — mixing elements of local culture with supposedly universal values derived from Western sources. Its hybridity was, and remains, its strength. Nonetheless, communism, as it developed in Shanghai and elsewhere, was just as much a colonial ideology as the liberal nationalism and the colonialism that it claimed to oppose.

Suggested reading

President Xi will never accept defeat

By Ian Birrell

Let’s try to imagine a counterfactual. What would have been different if European states had not mastered naval gunnery? What if there hadn’t been opium wars or treaty ports, missionaries or magazines? What if Japan had remained closed?

The Qing Empire was already in crisis by 1840. Its economy was failing to provide for its people, hardship was spreading, and rebel groups were already challenging central authority.  In time, these dynamics would have probably spelled the end of the empire. The Qing Dynasty, a Manchu lineage whose homeland was north of the Great Wall, would have collapsed and their state would have fragmented.

Lacking the “glue” of Western notions of nationalism to hold the state together, the empire’s constituent parts — Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria and “China Proper” — would have split. Perhaps those areas closest to the Soviet Union would have ended up being incorporated within it (as Mongolia was in 1921). Some parts of the empire may have ended up communist but not Chinese Communist.

Without the treaty ports, the international connections, the intellectual milieu and the organisational networks that developed as a result of imperial interference, there would have been no political space in which the CCP could emerge. The imperial powers provided it all. So, when Xi Jinping and the Politburo celebrate their party’s centenary over the coming weeks, they should really raise a glass to the colonialists who got them to where they are today.

Finally, when they unfurled the flags for Xi’s three-day trip, there was lunch for the Red Emperor with the Queen, a glitzy state banquet, two nights at Buckingham Palace and an address to Parliament. But there were also pictures of the President standing aboard a London bus, enjoying fish and chips over a pint with Dave and hanging out with football stars in Manchester — all designed to reinforce the narrative of an ordinary bloke who happened to be ruling one-sixth of the world’s population.

“He has a confident and bullish exterior — he sees himself very much as the big leader,” wrote Cameron in his biography. “But behind the scenes I found him reflective and thoughtful.” Yet there seems surprisingly little wider interest in this enigmatic character who changed the course of China and now seeks to reshape the world.

That state visit came at a time of greater optimism, when many people beyond the Tory leadership fell for the delusion that China might be nominally a Communist country but, propelled by capitalism and consumerism, was sliding inexorably down a path towards greater freedom. How different the world looks today — and not just due to the devastating pandemic that mysteriously emerged from the heart of China, made all the worse by the state cover-up.

More from this author

The WHO's Covid shame

By Ian Birrell

Indeed, there is a growing consensus that this is a country intent on pushing its dictatorial creed in a tussle for global supremacy against Western liberal democracy. It is a nation which has inflicted genocide on Muslim minorities, throttled freedom in Hong Kong, threatened Taiwan, sabre-rattled on borders in the Himalayas, developed a sinister surveillance society and even infiltrated our universities to scoop up their latest research.

All of which makes the lack of curiosity surrounding the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong seem rather strange. As Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of Chinese history, recently asked: “Why are there no biographies of Xi Jinping?”. Their absence is all the more striking when you consider that China’s ruler is not simply far more important than the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has spawned a small library of books; he is also a fascinating figure with a compelling life story.

Lurking behind that calm facade lies a childhood tale that helps cast some light on Xi’s controlling policies and his aggressive nationalism. Bear in mind that it is Xi who turned his nation back towards harsh totalitarianism, ordered his acolytes to ratchet up repression in Xinjiang and broke any pretence of keeping to the handover deal with Britain to protect Hong Kong’s freedoms. He has ditched term limits to retain power, crushed party foes, stifled domestic dissent and enshrined his name in the party constitution, elevating his position and ideology to the status of Chairman Mao. It is hard to disagree with the view of former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd that he is “the most formidable politician of our age”.

It does not take a psychologist to see that the seeds of his ruthless desire for order, his rigid toughness and perhaps even his political pragmatism may have been sown during his turbulent background, even if it is hard to disentangle the myths from the man. Like any smart modern politician, Xi knows the power of public relations and has worked hard over the decades to create an image that dovetails with both his personal and national desires. Hence those “man of the people” pictures over a pint down The Plough with Cameron.

Suggested reading

How China bought Britain's universities

By Mark Edmonds

Like his British host, Xi had an elite upbringing that involved attendance at one of his nation’s finest schools — although in his case, this led only to trouble and tragedy during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Xi, born in 1953, is the son of Xi Zhongxun, a Communist revolutionary hero who was close to Mao and became a vice premier. Although China was riddled with poverty, this prominent family lived in a compound for party chiefs with their own cooks, nannies and drivers. One official biography claims that his parents sought to ensure their children were not spoilt, so he wore clothes handed down from his siblings — including floral shoes from his sisters that were dyed black. His father, meanwhile, was so strict that friends said his treatment of his son bordered on inhuman, and Xi also attended the “CCP aristocracy school” in Beijing infamous for military-style discipline. Any hint of softness, said one classmate, was seen as weakness.

Disaster struck when he was nine. His father fell out with Mao amid party in-fighting, so was sent to work in a factory in central China and his family lost its prized home —although his mother Qi Xin retained her party job in Beijing. Worse came in the 1966 Cultural Revolution, with its brutal purging of senior officials as enemies of the state. His father was beaten, paraded on a truck through jeering crowds and jailed. The family home was ransacked by militants, his mother forced into hard labour on a farm. Xi, a bookish boy, was made to denounce his father and bullied by teachers as the child of a “black gang”, the term for disgraced officials. His older sister eventually killed herself after being “persecuted to death”.

The following year Xi’s school was shut down and turned into an exhibition to showcase the pampered privileges of the reactionary elite. At the age of 14, he was caught by a gang of revolutionary Red Guards, who threatened to execute him before making him read quotations from Mao. Another time, he fled from a meeting attacked by students armed with clubs, who caught and badly beat one of his friends. “I always had a stubborn streak and wouldn’t put up with being bullied,” he claimed later. “I riled the radicals and they blamed me for everything that went wrong.”

There can be little doubt that Xi suffered as the son of a prominent man who was purged repeatedly for remaining loyal to his lifetime cause of communism. Xi himself only evaded jail after Mao, seeking to regain control of spiralling chaos, ordered 30 million young city dwellers into the countryside for “re-education” by peasants. Analysts speculate this difficult period in his teenage years led to Xi’s ability to hide his feelings beneath an impassive surface, along with the development of his fervent desire for stability. “This generation had everything taken from them so they have the survival instinct,” said Kerry Brown, professor of China Studies at King’s College, London. “They had to deny who they were. It becomes all about control with no room for ego.”

Suggested reading

China's plan for medical domination

By Steve Boggan

Xi has since made much of the seven long years he spent as a “son of yellow earth”, living from the age of 15 in a cave dwelling in a remote, impoverished village in Shaanxi region. “I felt lonely at first,” he admitted in his autobiography. He found it a shock to eat rough peasant food, sleep on flea-ridden blankets and perform hard rural labour. Dozens of others sent to this region died from disease or the tough conditions. Instead Xi developed extraordinary self-discipline: “The knife is sharpened on a stone, people are strengthened in adversity,” he said later.

His loathing of chaos was fuelled later by the collapse of the other major twentieth-century Communist empire. “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?” he once asked. “In the end nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist.”

Yet during those formative years he also saw the danger of extremism, when children had free reign to kill and torture in the name of delivering utopia. Did this all leave him with the pragmatism needed to achieve his goals? A leaked US diplomatic cable, based on information from a friend, reported that Xi focused from an early age on reaching the top as an “exceptionally ambitious” character. Unlike many youths who “made up for lost time by having fun” after the Cultural Revolution, Xi “chose to survive by becoming redder than the red”, reading Karl Marx and laying foundations for a political career. He was seen as “cold and calculating”, deemed “boring” by women.

Now he wants to impose his will on the world, having navigated a path through the choppy waters of the Chinese Communist Party. Today, our challenge is not China, that huge land of epic history and extraordinary culture; it is President Xi and his vision of total control. His goal is clear: to make his country great again while usurping the global leadership of the United States — and he does not hide his aims.

In a speech to his party’s 2017 National Congress, Xi laid out “the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation”: to finish building a prosperous society by this year, centenary of the party’s birth; to assume global economic and military leadership by 2035; then to “resolve” the Taiwan issue by 2049, centenary of the People’s Republic, to conclude their rebirth as a “strong country”.

At the centre of his vision lies the Communist Party, firmly in control of everything in China, aided by skilled propaganda and use of technology to control his people in Orwellian style as they walk, talk, shop and work. Such is Xi’s sway that a smartphone app was developed which allowed users to compete over who could virtually applaud that party congress speech with the most enthusiasm — more than one billion claps were recorded in 24 hours. Two years later, the most downloaded app in the country was “Study the Great Nation”, which combined chat and games with quizzes about Xi’s ideology — a digital update on Mao’s Little Red Book designed to ensure compliance and diligence from citizens.

When Xi first met Putin in 2013, he told the Russian president: “We are similar in character.” There is truth in this statement, yet the Chinese leader is far more subtle and ambitious. Xi Jinping sees himself as a saviour of his creed and a man of destiny for his country, a ruthless character driven by fierce resolve inflamed by that suffering of his youth. He is the very embodiment of that Confucian saying: “To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.”

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?

More from this series

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.

More from this series

How China bought Britain's universities

By Mark Edmonds

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.

More from this series

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.

More from this series

China's plan for medical domination

By Steve Boggan

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.

The harmless-looking retired cadre, now an amiable old man who pinched my cheeks, had been the village party secretary who forced my father to perform manual labour — running after cows with a basket to pick up the droppings — because, as the son of a landlord, he could not be trusted with an education. The local businessman, now on his second wife and third Audi, had belonged to a gang of high school children who beat him for being descended from counter-revolutionaries.

Some of my father’s tormentors were blood relatives, who were especially keen to display their revolutionary credentials through violence, a situation that was sadly not uncommon: it was rumoured that Bo Xilai, who nearly supplanted Xi Jinping before being imprisoned, had broken his own father’s ribs as a Red Guard. Only the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 saved my father, who took the university entrance examinations a few years later, and never looked back.

Since the beginning of — shall we call it our 2020 cultural moment? — much ink has been spilled on whether there are similarities between the current protests-cum-riots and China’s Cultural Revolution. Even though some of its cheerleaders openly make the comparison, most commentators dismiss the idea, including UnHerd‘s Daniel Kalder.

To my father, and indeed to many of his contemporaries, the answer is clear. They had lived through it, and although they cannot put their finger on the why, they can feel a certain febrility in the air which reminded them of the events of half a century ago. But with their accented English and unfashionable politics (few, for some reason, are especially well-disposed toward the western Left), they have been largely excluded from the conversation. Or they could be biased, as western Marxist academics used to say of the testimonies of eastern European refugees who had been in Communist prisons.

Suggested reading

The disturbing history of statue-smashing

By Sean Thomas

As they say, history rhymes but does not repeat itself. There are a few notable differences between the Cultural Revolution and today’s protest movement. For one thing, the levers of political power in the US and the UK are still in the hands of conservatives, and President Trump hasn’t been shy in using the might of the American state against the protestors.

But no historical analogy is ever perfect, and to seek exactitude over verisimilitude is to miss the point. There are differences, yes, but when it comes to fundamentals, the two moments have much in common.

For instance, the Red Guards of 1968 often came from privileged backgrounds. The first groups emerged from the elite high schools and universities in Beijing and belonged to the generation that had been born immediately after the Communist takeover in 1949. Raised on stories of revolutionary heroism and bitterly disappointed at the fact they had missed their chance to display their Red credentials.

Hence, when Mao Zedong, for reasons of internecine party warfare, decided to claim — absurdly — that the Communist Party was filled with bourgeois counter-revolutionaries, the young students saw their chance to achieve revolutionary greatness. The Red Guards thus went out, seeking to root out imaginary class enemies from within.

Similarly, today’s revolutionary vanguard is also made up of young, well-educated people, a disproportionate number hailing from elite educational institutions and working within elite professions. They grew up at a time of unprecedented progress in race relations, but it meant the main action was already over when they were coming of age.

Suggested reading

This is no 'cultural revolution'

By Daniel Kalder

Thus, the idea that elite Anglo-American institutions are filled with closeted racists, absurd though it is to anyone who has worked in them, became an article of faith overnight. Whether it is in newsrooms, universities or progressive advocacy groups, the hunt for secret racists gives these would-be Selma marchers a sense of purpose.

Then as now, the initial response from the establishment was largely positive. After all, the cause they were asked to endorse was a worthy one, and any excesses could be dismissed as unrepresentative youthful zeal. Were they not simply seeking a better country, a better world? But the initial indulgence would soon backfire, as the movement spiralled outside of their control. Mobs have a logic of their own, and soon the legacy elites found they could no longer exert any control over the crowds they had cheered on.

Eventually, the movement’s slogans make their way downstream to non-elite institutions and popular discourse. In due course, no entity, however remote from the issue at hand, could refuse to make public statements in support of the movement. In China, no book, be it about astronomy or sewing patterns, could fail to contain an introduction with fulsome praise for Chairman Mao, complete with quotations from his collected works. Similarly, today businesses selling anything from teabags to maths degrees feel the need to bend the metaphorical knee to the protesters.

The destruction of the old elite naturally creates opportunities for new ones. Indeed sometimes, the young would-be elites don’t even bother to hide their aims in ousting the old guard. At the Poetry Foundation, which sits on a pot of $250 million, the leadership was overthrown by a group of poets and assorted hangers-on who, in an open letter, called for the redistribution of the endowment to “those whose labor amassed those funds”, namely themselves. In China, meanwhile, Red Guards eventually took over the whole government, kicked out officials from their offices and put themselves in charge.

And there is of course the blatant denial of reality, the constant gaslighting which almost seems designed to ferret out people with any sanity left. In the midst of a global pandemic, thousands of epidemiologists and health scientists signed an open letter claiming that protesting took precedence over disease control. Even there lies a parallel: during the Cultural Revolution, marauding Red Guards created a cerebrospinal meningitis pandemic which killed 160,000 people. Then as now, making revolution trumped public health.

But the Cultural Revolution’s most enduring legacy in China was not the Year Zero-style iconoclasm, nor the systematic persecution of millions of people, but the destruction of the bonds of organic trust which hold together a society. Children denounced their parents, students their teachers, classmates each other. Chinese people today are wont to ascribe their low-trust society to the events of the 1960s, an interpretation with empirical backing.

Suggested reading

How a 1990s book predicted 2020

By Ed West

In America, students aren’t beating their teachers to death yet, as they did in 1960s China. But university students have for some time been cancelling professors who refuse to toe the line on BLM. In high schools, students have set up social media accounts dedicated to exposing classmates guilty of wrong-think. In the casual words of Mx Anamika Arya, a 16-year old leading one such effort, “I don’t want people like that to keep getting jobs”.

On Twitter, Skai Jackson, a child actress with half a million followers, has been doxing teenagers in order to pressure universities to rescind their university admission offers for the same reasons. Meanwhile, on TikTok, Zoomers’ favourite social media platform, users have been posting videos of their unwoke parents, complete with teary denunciations.

Of course, the current folly might well end. People might come to their senses and realise that we live in the least racist society there has ever been, that the way to prevent another George Floyd killing is through reform of qualified immunity, not mindless destruction, and that racism is an indelible by-product of human frailty.

There may still be cause for optimism, eventually. The Red Guards were eventually liquidated and sent down to the countryside for manual labour, their precious university spots taken by worker-peasant-soldier students with better proletarian credentials. The Cultural Revolution ended up lasting for a mere decade and was followed by show trials and lustration of the ringleaders. All revolutions burn out eventually, and the revolutionaries themselves become victims of their own fervour — and with any luck we will see the same thing happen with America’s own cultural revolution.