Xi Jinping leading a pledge of vows to the Chinese Communist Party at a Gala celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the CCP. Credit: Ng Han Guan via AP Photo
Xi Jinping is obsessed with history: his place in it, the power of the past to shore up support for the Chinese Communist Party’s rule, and why it must, therefore, be kept under firm control. The failure to do that, he has warned since his earliest days as a leader, could threaten the party’s very existence.
“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse?” he asked in a private speech to party officials in December 2012, less than a month after becoming general secretary. “An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered,” he said. “In the end, nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist.”
He returned to that theme during a seminar for senior cadres in January 2013, where he detailed how this failure of ideological control and the wanton attacks the Soviet leadership had permitted on the past had doomed the former superpower. “There was a complete denial of Soviet history, denial of Lenin, denial of Stal
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