China’s Communist party has rewritten its own past – but the truth will surface | Rana Mitter

The history of the century-old party is far more interesting than its sanitised propaganda would suggest

A new museum commemorating the history of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) opened in June in Beijing as part of the runup to the party’s 100th anniversary. Online images of its collections show reverential black-and-white photos of the dozen or so young men who gathered at the party’s founding meeting in Shanghai in 1921. Those activists, one of whom was a young library assistant called Mao Zedong, would have found the China of 2021 impossible to recognise: an economic behemoth run by the most powerful and longest-lasting Communist party in the world.

Yet although much of the CCP’s propaganda is firmly focused on the future, the party is still obsessed with controlling the telling of its own past. The museum’s narrative is of a China brought to peace and prosperity by the inevitability of the CCP’s rise to power. The bumpy realities of history, from the failed policies and leaders of the party’s early years to the purges and brutalities that have marked its time in power, are played down or absent. The CCP has always been opaque about its own internal workings. Control of its narrative is another way of maintaining that mystery.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3dyAXRf