openpolitics.com

The country’s rulers do not just suppress history, they recreate it to serve the present. They know that, in a communist state, change often starts when the past is challenged

.. On the one hand, we know this is a country where a rich civilisation existed for millennia, yet we are overwhelmed by a sense of rootlessness.

.. What does this tell us about a country? Optimists feel a sense of dynamism – here, at last, is a country getting on with things while the rest of the world stagnates or plods forward. This is always said with amazement and awe. The apex of this era of wonder came shortly before the 2008 Olympics, when the western media tripped over itself trying to trot out the most effusive praise for China’s rise/transformation/rejuvenation – pick your cliche.

.. The bluntest I have experienced is this: a country that has so completely obliterated and then recreated its past – can it be trusted?

What eats at a country, or a people, or a civilisation, so much that it remains profoundly uncomfortable with its history? History is lauded in China. Ordinary people will tell you every chance they get that they have 5,000 years of culture: wuqiannian de wenhua.

.. It is hard to overstate history’s role in a Chinese society run by a communist party. Communism itself is based on historical determinism: one of Marx’s points was that the world was moving inexorably towards communism, an argument that regime-builders such as Lenin and Mao used to justify their violent rises to power. In China, Marxism is layered on top of much older ideas about the role of history. Each succeeding dynasty wrote its predecessor’s history, and the dominant political ideology – what is now generically called Confucianism – was based on the concept that ideals for ruling were to be found in the past, with the virtuous ruler emulating them. Performance mattered, but mainly as proof of history’s judgment.

.. The unstated reason for Xi’s unwillingness to disavow the Mao era is that Mao is not just China’s Stalin. The Soviet Union was able to discard Stalin because it still had Lenin to fall back on as its founding father. For the Communist party of China, Mao is Stalin and Lenin combined; attack Mao and his era and you attack the foundations of the Communist state.

..  Five years after the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976, the party issued a statement that condemned that era and Mao’s role in it, but which also ended further discussion of Mao by declaring that “his contributions to the Chinese revolution far outweigh his mistakes. His merits are primary and his errors secondary.”

.. history is especially sensitive because change in a communist country often starts with history being challenged. In the 1980s, for example, groups such as the historical-research society Memorial morphed into a social movement that undermined the Soviet Union by uncovering its troubled past

.. The Communist party does not just suppress history, it recreates it to serve the present. In China, this has followed the party’s near self-destruction in the Cultural Revolution, which led to a desperate search for ideological legitimacy. At first, this was mainly economic, but following the massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, the party began to promote itself more aggressively as the defender of Chinese culture and tradition.

.. on 5 December of that year, Xi visited Confucius’s hometown of Qufu, picked up a copy of The Analects – a book of sayings and ideas of the great sage – as well as a biography of him, and declared: “I want to read these carefully.” He also coined his own Confucianesque aphorism – “A state without virtue cannot endure.” The next year, he became the first Communist party leader to participate in a commemoration of Confucius’s birthday.

.. Xi said, “to understand today’s China, today’s Chinese people, we must understand Chinese culture and blood, and nourish the Chinese people’s grasp of its own cultural soil”.

.. The bamboo slips that Liu was describing are from a much later date, but they challenge certainties of Chinese culture in other, possibly more profound ways. The texts stem from the Warring States period, an era of turmoil in China that ran from the 5th to the 3rd centuries BC. All major Chinese schools of thought that exist today stem from this era, especially Taoism and Confucianism

.. The bamboo slips change how we understand this era. Some have compared its impact on China’s understanding of the past to how the past was viewed in Europe’s Enlightenment, a period when western core texts were for the first time analysed as historical documents instead of texts delivered intact from antiquity. “It’s as though suddenly you had texts that discussed Socrates and Plato that you didn’t know existed,” Sarah Allan, a Dartmouth university professor who has worked with Liu and Li in the project

..  “People also say it’s like the Dead Sea scrolls, but they’re more important than that. This isn’t apocrypha. These texts are from the period when the core body of Chinese philosophy was being discussed. They are transforming our understanding of Chinese history.”

..  One text, for example, argues in favour of meritocracy much more forcefully than is found in currently known Confucian texts. Until now, the Confucian texts only allowed for abdication or replacement of a ruler as a rare exception; otherwise kingships were hereditary – a much more pro-establishment and anti-revolutionary standpoint. The new texts argue against this. For an authoritarian state wrapping itself in “tradition” to justify its never-ending rule, the implications of this new school are subtle but interesting. “This isn’t calling for democracy,” Allan told me, “but it more forcefully argues for rule by virtue instead of hereditary rule.”

.. “We think we have another 15 volumes, so that’s another 15 years – until I’m retired,” Liu said, laughing. “But then you and others will be debating this for the rest of this century. The research is endless.”

.. For them, he held a key to the present: the past.