How the CCP shapes national memory

Newspeak and Newthink: China’s “Rejuvenation” of Its Memory

by Volker Stanzel

Published by 

World Scientific Publishing Company

252 pages $45

 

 

Political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson famously defined the nation as an “imagined community” that is built on a “common memory” from which governments seek to draw legitimacy. Since the birth of nation-states, every government has invested in this process, no more so than China. Volker Stanzel’s book Newspeak and Newthink: China’s “Rejuvenation” of Its Memory is a detailed analysis of how China under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has shaped the process of memory building and modification. As the author, a former German ambassador to Japan and China, writes “ … every plant in the country’s collective memory field bends to what the Party and/or government deem to be in the country’s best interest — or the Party’s”. 

 

The foundation of the CCP’s legitimacy and the social contract it has with the Chinese people is rooted in  the term it coined: “One Hundred Years of Humiliation”. This refers to the period of subjugation and social collapse as a result of the Opium Wars that China fought against the British. Those wars created the hated foreign Treaty Ports, coastal enclaves of free trade where the Emperor’s writ did not run. After 1949, the CCP sought to portray itself as the force that liberated China from this century of humiliation, enabling it to claim the traditional imperial title of “the mandate from heaven”. 

The author discusses in detail almost every policy the CCP employed to mould China’s memory to its purposes — the patriotic education campaign, building of museums and monuments, visual reassertions of its narrative through movies and theatres, “wolf warrior” or confrontational diplomacy, Confucius Institutes, the powerful United Front Works Department that manages non-CCP groups and so on. “Within about a decade, 353 such national sites of patriotic education had been designed or newly established. The dimension of that elaborate organizational and tactical effort shows the strong will of the Party to establish a consistent and resilient narrative of the role of the Communist Party as a guardian of the memory of China in all its historical greatness,” he writes. The author’s descriptions of the museums, explaining how the design of the buildings and the positioning of the artefacts all serve propaganda purposes, are particularly interesting.   

Mr Stanzel also highlights how “remembering also gives legitimacy, strength, and force to the process of imagining what is not yet visible: the future”. In the last seven decades since “the founding of the PRC, the CCP has successfully created a newly blossoming memory field for the country it rules. It draws on memories, of the living and the dead, told and written memories, ancient myths and present dreams, ordered systematically, and turned into instruments of the Party’s politics of memory with the Patriotic Education Campaign and of a broad range of initiatives ascribed to Xi Jinping”. 

This memory building impacts not only domestic politics but also Chinese foreign policy under Xi Jinping where “rejuvenation has become a part of the global enterprise”. No surprises, then, that the CCP has built the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on the memory of the ancient Silk Road, while a reprisal of Zheng He, the Ming Dynasty admiral famous for extensive voyages in the Indian Ocean, shaped the idea of Chinese civilisation as being non-hegemonic. After almost 600 years since his first voyage, “Zheng He has become … a building block in the process of Chinese confidence-building in the global arena”. This coupled with China’s assertion of a “new form of human civilization” is rooted in its aim “to position China as a leader in addressing global challenges”. 

The author concludes that the CCP’s engagement with memory is not limited to how it talks about the events — or “Newspeak”. It has moved a step ahead to “Newthink”. As he writes, “Beyond getting the words right, to reflect the world as it should be, it would be an objective of governance to get thoughts themselves ‘right’.” This effort is strengthened by Xi Jinping’s push for “historical nihilism”. In China today, there is no space for alternative or parallel history or memory and “unity is probably meant to be total”. 

Outwardly, China’s Orwellian effort to streamline national thinking may appear successful. But can a multi-ethnic nation of 1.4 billion people really have a common memory? The CCP’s challenges remain when it tries to suppress memories of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, the Hong Kong protests and the assaults on ethnic minorities, especially the Tibetan, Uyghurs and Mongols. Nor can the CCP ignore that the challenges Taiwan poses to its unified memory project. In fact, the reality appears to be that the more uniformity the CCP aims for, the more violent it becomes. 

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The reviewer is associate professor, O P Jindal Global University