The Communist party of China has an intrinsically fraught relationship with history, which it variously comprehends as a mirror (reflecting back uncomfortable truths) or war (a determined battle for ideological supremacy). But mostly, says Guardian journalist and former China correspondent Tania Branigan, the party views history as a tool. “It can be adjusted as necessary yet appears solid and immutable: today’s imperatives seem graven in stone, today’s facts the outcome of a logical, inexorable process. Life as it is meant to be.”
When the facts don’t fit the script, as Branigan illustrates over and again in this glorious, patchworked study of the legacy of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, China’s leaders are brazen in enforcing forgetfulness. There is a long precedent for such edicts, she notes, citing the Qin dynasty eunuch described as “presenting a deer and calling it a horse, to find out which officials would obey without question. Some were quick to agree with him; he had the others executed.”
