On September 20, popular Chinese livestreamer Li Jiaqi, known as the “Lipstick King” for his impressive ability to boost sales of lipsticks and other makeup products, reappeared on Chinese streams for the first time in three months Li had disappeared from the Chinese network due to a mistake he probably had no idea he was making. In the midst of their summer sales push, on June 3, one of their employees brought out a tank-shaped cake. Unfortunately, June 4 is the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, and Chinese authorities relentlessly police any sign of commemoration.
Li and many of his fans were born after the massacre. Maybe they didn’t even know it happened. China has long policed historical memory, erasing and rewriting references to past atrocities and insisting on adherence to official narratives. As President Xi Jinping said in a speech last year, “you know history; love the party.” Today, this relentless censorship is increasingly focused online.
Ahead of the critical 20th Party Congress starting on October 16, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is inviting netizens to avoid those guilty of “historical nihilism”.
On September 20, popular Chinese livestreamer Li Jiaqi, known as the “Lipstick King” for his impressive ability to boost sales of lipsticks and other makeup products, reappeared on Chinese streams for the first time in three months Li had disappeared from the Chinese network due to a mistake he probably had no idea he was making. In the midst of their summer sales push, on June 3, one of their employees brought out a tank-shaped cake. Unfortunately, June 4 is the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, and Chinese authorities relentlessly police any sign of commemoration.
Li and many of his fans were born after the massacre. Maybe they didn’t even know it happened. China has long policed historical memory, erasing and rewriting references to past atrocities and insisting on adherence to official narratives. As President Xi Jinping said in a speech last year, “you know history; love the party.” Today, this relentless censorship is increasingly focused online.
Ahead of the critical 20th Party Congress starting on October 16, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is inviting netizens to avoid those guilty of “historical nihilism”.
The term has been used by officials for decades, but was given new significance when it was listed as one of the seven ideological threats facing the party in Document no. 9, which was leaked in 2013 and hinted at Xi’s intellectual agenda when it began. his term as party president. According to the document, historical nihilism is “equivalent to denying the legitimacy of the CCP’s long-term political dominance.”
Any fact, statistic, opinion or memory that does not fit the official line can therefore be framed as a violation of the party’s anti-historical-nihilism campaign. Authorities are taking action: More than 2 million social media posts allegedly “spreading historical nihilism” were deleted in the months leading up to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) centenary celebrations last year. In a speech last April, CAC director Zhuang Rongwen described the need to “forcefully refute historical nihilism and other incorrect ideological viewpoints” on the Internet.
Historical nihilism is important enough to deserve its own report center, where netizens can poke at each other for sharing posts that “distort the history of the party or the history of the new China.”
The incentives to snitch are strong. In the context of curtailed civil liberties and curtailed political and, increasingly, personal liberties, defending the Party’s version of China’s history, the only version of history it can safely be proud of, is a way to ensure your own safety, or to advance your career.
The leadership’s incentives to deal with so-called historical nihilism are even clearer. Framing the past as justification for the current party leadership is essentially existential for the CCP and its leaders.
Subjects of Marxism and heirs of Maoism, they maintain that the primacy of the party is the result of historical inevitability. As stated in document no. 9, one facet of historical nihilism is “denying the historical inevitability of China’s choice of the socialist path.” The explicit need to exercise historical control, even and especially as online platforms become more advanced and intertwined with everyday life, demonstrates the belief of party officials, and specifically Xi, that tolerating controversial stories threatens the regime’s legitimacy and stability.
As researcher Joseph Torigian has written foreign policy, “Xi uniquely understands why historical grudges and differing views on the past are so potentially explosive.” That’s because his father, also a prominent CCP leader, was part of a Northwest Revolutionary-era cabal filled with violence and, later, controversy over how to spell or omit this violence in the history of the party. As Xi Zhongxun said at a meeting held to resolve the history of Party violence in the Northwest in 1945, although it was “no big deal” if people ignored the history, “the most harmful thing is the distortion and falsification of history”.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Xi’s approach to historical nihilism equally emphasizes the crime of distortion. For him, distortions are defined by their deviation from the party line. History is either official history, or it is nothing, non-belief, nihilism.
Such a stark contrast gives power to the party. The CCP’s official narrative positions its own rule as not only essential but inevitable, both in the past and in the future. Part of this effort involves making explicit connections between past and present struggles.
“Xi’s nationalism is very much looking forward to the 21st century, but it also draws on some aspects of the 20th to strengthen itself,” said Rana Mitter, a professor of modern Chinese history and politics at the University of China. Oxford.
The party has come up with two complementary terms to arrive at its projected future and its past failures. “‘National rejuvenation’ is about restoring China to its rightful position and a global player in its own right,” Mitter said. “‘National humiliation’ refers to all the factors that have prevented it.” Conveniently, only the CCP can deliver the Chinese people from humiliation to real rejuvenation.
Along the way, it is essential that the party has a moral for each historical story: a clear connective tissue between past events and their implications for the present and the future.
“One of the lines that [Xi] The uses about World War II is that it was the first time that China was attacked by an outside power and was able to fight back, which gives it a particular kind of cachet,” explained Mitter.
This World War II framing carries a strong nationalist narrative with clear contemporary applications in the context of US-China competition. But coming up with a contemporary idea for each historical event is an ambitious project, and one that betrays the party’s degree of dependence on historical narratives.
The current leadership’s heavy investment in rewriting the scholarship of Chinese and international historians on Qing history, for example, demonstrates the depth of both their insecurity and their commitment to historical revision. Meanwhile, despite the official line that the Cultural Revolution was a disaster, the authorities’ tolerance of neo-Maoist websites, which Mitter described as creating “a nostalgic, rosy version of the era, painting it as one of camaraderie rather than violence,” shows that there is more room to move beyond the party line if you are going in a positive direction.
But Xi has clearly deduced that, for his own political protection, he should be the gatekeeper not only of China’s history, but also of its historiography.
“Societies that don’t allow for nuance tend to create a story that’s more useful to politicians than to historians,” Mitter said.
In an intensified effort to tighten control over all discussions of history, China’s interagency speech control apparatus is also actively merging the fight against “rumors” with the elimination of historical nihilism.
In 2021, a division of the CAC called the China Internet Joint Rumor Platform listed 10 historical events for which violating the official narrative constitutes clear historical nihilism. The Communist Party members’ website described the list of untouchables as “10 history-related rumors that have flooded the online world for a long time.” The announcement aims to put these rumors to bed, stating that they have been “debunked”.
Since the party is very defensive of its own reputation and, separately, of the question of Chinese history, it is perhaps not so shocking that it is more sensitive about the combination of the two: the history of the party. According to the announcement of the 10 irrefutable events, “online rumors involving the history of the party seriously pollute the ecology of the Internet, mislead the public and harm the image of the party.”
Even so, the 10 isolated events, raised in the form of a question by the China Digital Times, seem laughably trivial: Was Hu Qiaomu, Mao Zedong’s secretary, the real author of a poem by Mao, “Snow, in the Tone of Spring in the Garden of Qin”? Was Mao Anying, Mao Zedong’s son, martyred for giving up his position while making egg fried rice? Was the Long March less than 25,000 li (7,767 miles)? Did the party center unleash Deng Yingchao’s diary to investigate its own history?
This diary, which belonged to former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s wife Deng Yingchao, includes suggestions that Zhou regretted supporting Mao’s policies. This rumor about possible suspicions that one long-dead former Chinese leader had about another was important enough to be the subject of a 2018 article published by the Party Literature Research Center.
The article attempts to debunk the original allegations of Zhou’s opposition to Mao, arguing: “This kind of deliberate misrepresentation, this made-up story, defames and recklessly damages the reputation of our leaders. It’s not just a flawed story; it’s a deranged story.”
This alleged intentional contempt for CCP leaders will not go unpunished. The publication concludes: “We should consider establishing the responsibility to investigate [instances of historical nihilism] and punish the offenders, so we can regroup and come back even stronger.”
Following a controversy over some key CCP “martyrs”, the Standing Committee of the Politburo passed the “Heroes and Martyrs Protection Law” in 2018. According to the official story, the five martyrs of Langya Mountain in 1941 they tricked and then fought the The Japanese army escaped civilians.
Then, when they had exhausted their options, they jumped off a cliff in a heroic display of bravery and defiance. The descendants of these martyrs sued Hong Zhenkui, who wrote based on his research in an academic paper that the men had fallen, rather than jumped, off the cliff. He was found guilty on the basis that the stories of heroes and martyrs are the “common historical memory” of the Chinese nation and “the reputation and honor of heroes and martyrs are protected by law.”
As the Chinese government continues to invest in advanced technologies that shrink private spaces, the degree of surveillance of Chinese citizens is likely to increase. In such a society, history becomes another risk, indisputable unless it adheres to the party line.
