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Title: Chinese Party Marks Nine Decades
Source:
WSJ
URL Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100 ... tml?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_world
Published: Jul 2, 2011
Author: JEREMY PAGE
Post Date: 2011-07-02 13:48:43 by CZ82
Keywords: None
Views: 2407
Comments: 4
Chinese Party Marks Nine Decades JEREMY PAGE BEIJING—Eager to bolster its legitimacy in the eyes of an increasingly restive and Internet-savvy society, China's Communist Party is marking its 90th anniversary Friday with a no-holds-barred campaign to reassert its airbrushed version of modern history. For a Chinese leadership spooked by uprisings in the Arab world, the campaign is designed to hammer home the message that only the party could have engineered China's emergence as the world's second-largest economy, and only the party can keep raising living standards, while maintaining social stability. Chinese paramilitary police took part in a celebration in Nanjing on Thursday before the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party. The party is marking the anniversary with a campaign to reassert its airbrushed version of modern history. .. But for its critics its heavy-handed efforts are only highlighting the party's failure to evolve politically and to come to terms with its own past, especially the 1958-61 Great Leap Forward—when millions starved to death in a push to jump-start industrialization—and the chaos of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. Propaganda czars appear to have spared no expense in their efforts, overseeing production of a star-studded feature film on the party's founding, a weighty new history book on its first three decades in power, and countless exhibitions, television shows, newspaper editorials and revolutionary singing pageants. To ensure the success of the film, "Beginning of the Great Revival," cinemas have been barred from premiering Hollywood blockbusters during its run, many state employees have been ordered to watch it, and at least two entertainment websites appear to have stopped letting users review the film, which has garnered mixed responses since its release three weeks ago. State media have also provided blanket coverage of leaders attending a string of lavish and rigidly choreographed anniversary events, including a four-hour song and dance extravaganza on Wednesday night that featured 1,500 performers, and was attended by the entire 25-member Politburo. "History has proved that only the [Communist Party of China] can save China," declared a commentary from state-run Xinhua news agency that was widely published across state media Thursday. The domestic security apparatus, meanwhile, has been using increasingly arbitrary and extrajudicial methods to silence the party's most prominent critics, including China's most famous contemporary artist Ai Weiwei, even after many of them have been released from custody. On Wednesday, Beijing police visited the home of Mao Yushi, an 83-year-old liberal economist who isn't related to Chairman Mao Zedong and has been highly critical of his policies, as well as of an increasingly vocal campaign to rehabilitate his memory in the last few months. The police told him he had to cancel a planned interview with the Voice of America that evening and was no longer permitted to give interviews about the founder of Communist China, Prof. Mao said. "I was very surprised—I've never experienced anything like this in recent times," said Prof. Mao, who has also received threatening telephone calls and emails since Maoist revivalist websites launched a campaign to have him prosecuted for criticizing Chairman Mao in a recent book review. "The government's aim is to emphasize the legitimacy of the party—that is their purpose—so they are avoiding talking about the party's mistakes." Like many Chinese of his generation, he said he personally suffered under Chairman Mao, almost dying of hunger during the Great Leap Forward, when he estimated that 80 or more people in his village of 700 starved to death. He and other liberal Chinese have long hoped the party will edge toward reassessing its past, especially as a new generation of leaders, many of whom were forced to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, prepares to take power next year. Instead, the party appears to be moving in the opposite direction, growing increasingly reluctant to acknowledge publicly even the mistakes it has admitted in the past. In an exhibition at the newly opened National Museum in Beijing, only two small photographs make fleeting and oblique references to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. A recent exhibition of party documents included none from that tumultuous period. The party's struggle with its own past was particularly evident in the compilation of "The History of the Chinese Communist Party Volume Two (1949-1978)," which was finally published in January, 16 years after it was begun. The first draft was finished in 1999, but its content was so sensitive that it took the party's top leaders another 12 years to review and revise it. Hu Sheng, the director of the party's History Research Office who conceived the book, died halfway through the process. Shi Zhongquan, a former deputy director of the History Research Office who took part in the project, said the initial aim had been to reassess the official verdict on the period. Earlier accounts had admitted, for example, that the population dropped 10 million in 1960, but hadn't given an overall death toll for the Great Leap Forward, which some historians put as high as 30 million-45 million. In the end, though, the new book reinforced the earlier verdict, and stuck with 10 million, because it was too complicated to forge a consensus among leaders, according to Prof. Shi. "We Chinese have this tradition of not writing history of our own time," he said. "We believe it's better to wait for the history to settle and subside first, so we can see clearer."
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