In contemporary China, it’s put into practice with surgical skill. The enforcement of forgettingįorgetting … is a crucial factor in the creation of the nation. Others, like the brutal 1989 crackdown in the streets leading up to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, which has just been removed from the new secondary school history curriculum in Hong Kong, must be forgotten. Certain episodes – the Chinese resistance to the Japanese in the 1930s and the second world war – can be remembered. It just has history, lots of it.įor the Chinese Dream to be achieved, it is imperative – as the president himself has spelled out – to ensure people “ have correct views on history”. It no longer even has a revolutionary ideology. The People’s Republic doesn’t have a religion, and it doesn’t have a constitution – or at least, not one that counts. As historian Antonia Finnane writes:Įvery country has its national myths, most of which are grounded in or derived from history but in China, history alone is the bedrock. History plays an increasingly important legitimising role in China. Yet it illuminates how history underpins President Xi’s “ Chinese Dream” of national rejuvenation. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.īuried at the end of the most important Chinese political speech in a decade, President Xi Jinping’s 66-page address to the 19th party congress in November 2017, was one short line: “The Chinese Dream is a dream about history, the present, and the future.” Tired after 71 ovations over three-and-a-half hours, the audience may have missed this sentence. This article is part of the Revolutions and Counter Revolutions series, curated by Democracy Futures as a joint global initiative between the Sydney Democracy Network and The Conversation.
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