Tania Branigan
“For Chinese people, history is our religion,” the intellectual Hu Ping has argued. “We don’t have a supernatural standard of right and wrong, good and bad, so we view History as the ultimate judge.” The Chinese Communist Party has finessed this tradition. It sees history not as a record, still less a debate, but 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. The contingencies and contradictions of the actual past are irrelevant. The truth is what the Party says, and what the Party chooses to remember.
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