By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

“Document Number Nine”

On Sept. 20, popular Chinese live-streamer Li Jiaqi, known as the “lipstick king” for his impressive ability to push lipstick sales and other makeup products, reappeared on Chinese streams for the first time in three months. Li had disappeared from the Chinese internet for a mistake he probably had no idea he was making. In the middle of his summer sales push, on June 3, one of his employees brought out a cake in the shape of a tank. Alas, June 4 is the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, and the Chinese authorities relentlessly police any hint of commemoration.

Li and many of his fans were born after the massacre occurred. They may not have even been aware it happened. China has long policed historical memory, deleting and rewriting references to past atrocities and insisting on adherence to official narratives. As President Xi Jinping said in a speech last year, “know history; love the party.” Today, that relentless censorship is increasingly focused online.

Ahead of the critical 20th Party Congress starting on Oct.16, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is inviting netizens to snitch on those guilty of “historical nihilism.”

Officials have used the term for decades, but it was given new importance when it was listed as one of the seven ideological threats the party faces in Document No. 9, which was leaked in 2013 as a political directive issued at the outset of Xi’s presidency, shows that the CCP perceives a liberal world order as inherently threatening: “Western anti-China forces and internal ‘dissidents’ are still actively trying to infiltrate China’s ideological sphere.”It states Xi’s intellectual agenda as he began his tenure as party chairman. According to the document, historical nihilism is tantamount to denying the legitimacy of the CCP’s long-term political dominance.

Any fact, statistic, opinion, or memory that doesn’t fit into the official line can thus be framed as a violation of the party’s anti-historical nihilism campaign. Authorities are taking action: More than 2 million social media posts alleged to be “disseminating historical nihilism” were reportedly deleted in the months before last year's centennial celebration of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In a speech last April, CAC Director Zhuang Rongwen described the necessity of “powerfully refuting historical nihilism and other incorrect ideological standpoints” on the internet.

Incorrect ideology is also why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did not issue a message of condolence on the death of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. In the words of Tsinghua University academic, Xie Maosong, “China’s decades-long economic success has shown the country has moved on, and there is no point in discussing Gorbachev.”

According to Christopher Vassallo, a China analyst at Blackstone, during the Xi era, there has been a fundamental shift from an emphasis on economic or leadership failure as the causes for the Soviet Union’s demise to more nebulous concepts of cultural, societal, or “moral” decay.

The leadership’s incentives for tackling so-called historical nihilism are even more explicit. Framing the past as a justification for present party leadership is essential for the CCP and its leaders.

Subjects of Marxism and inheritors of Maoism argue 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 in China’s choice of the socialist road.” The apparent need to exert historical control, even and especially as online platforms get more advanced and intertwined with everyday life, demonstrates party officials’ and, specifically, Xi’s belief that tolerating contested histories threatens the legitimacy and stability of the regime.

Xi uniquely understands why historical grudges and differing views about the past are so potentially explosive. That’s because his father, a prominent CCP leader, was part of a revolution-era clique from the northwest rife with violence and, later, controversy over how to write or omit such violence into party history. As Xi Zhongxun said at a meeting held to resolve the history of party violence in the northwest in 1945, while it was “no big deal” if people were ignorant about history, “the most damaging is the distortion and falsification of history.”

Xi Zhongxun, however, also is reported to have had a good relationship with the Dalai Lama before he fled China in 1959.

Historical nihilism is important enough to merit its reporting center, where netizens can rat on each other for sharing posts that “distort the history of the party or the history of new China.”

The incentives to snitch are strong. In the context of restrained civil liberties and curtailed political and, increasingly, personal freedoms, defending the party’s version of China’s history, the only version of history it can safely be proud of, is one way to guarantee your safety—or to advance your career.

 

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