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 Stalin, pursuit of historical nihilism, confusion of thought,” Xi said. “The great Soviet Communist Party scattered like birds and beasts.” He was determined not to allow the same thing to happen to the CCP.

Public support, Xi warned, was a matter of the CCP’s “survival or extinction” and history would play a critical role in the case they made for the party to remain in power.

As Xi saw it, national security was not just a matter of defending the country against physical or material threats, but also against those challenging it in the ideological realm. As he surveyed the landscape around him, he recognized some of the same looming dangers he believed had brought down the USSR. In China too, organizational discipline within the party was failing, rampant corruption had taken hold, and ideological control was crumbling.

The years of double-digit GDP growth and rapid economic development had bought the party’s leaders time, but they had coasted for long enough, and if they wanted to avoid the same fate as their Soviet counterparts, they would have to act fast. Public support, Xi warned, was a matter of the CCP’s “survival or extinction” and history would play a critical role in the case they made for the party to remain in power. Unlike the Soviet leadership, he was determined to be a “real man” and give everything he had to that fight.

The first indication of the role history would play came in a secret communique — which became known as Document No. 9 — that circulated among senior officials in April 2013. The document set out the “complicated, intense struggle” the party faced in the ideological sphere, and the seven “perils” they must confront if they wanted to maintain their grip on power, including “historical nihilism,” or denying the party’s version of history. Their enemies were using this tactic, the document warned, to undermine the CCP’s legitimacy and thereby threaten its “long-term political dominance.”

Xi was not the first modern Chinese leader to recognize the importance of history to the party’s popular appeal. Mao Zedong had long urged his officials to “make the past serve the present,” and Deng Xiaoping had identified the failure to educate the population about the historical necessity of the CCP’s rule as a crucial factor behind the Tiananmen protests in 1989.

“During the last ten years our biggest mistake was made in the field of education,” Deng told an audience of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officers on June 9, 1989, five days after the brutal crackdown on protesters. Memories of the bad old days before the party came to power were fading, Deng said, among a population that had come to take better living standards for granted and now demanded more of a say in their future.

The nationwide patriotic education campaign that followed during the 1990s drew heavily on the memory of that past and the “century of humiliation” China was said to have suffered. The narrative took in the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, and the carving up of the country at the hands of foreign imperialists, before the CCP rallied the population and founded the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. The unofficial slogan of the campaign was “Never Forget National Humiliation,” but the underlying message was: never forget the importance of the Communist Party.

When Xi took power two decades later, there was no mass uprising for the new leader to confront, yet he approached the role as though the party was in existential danger. He embarked on a high-profile campaign against corruption (making sure to take down some of his rivals in the process), reasserted the party’s control over all aspects of society, and, just as Deng had suggested, he paid much closer attention to ideological work, demanding strict fealty to the party’s version of history. This was not about remembering the country’s past as it actually was, but as the current leadership needs it to be, with the terrible atrocities that took place under the party’s rule relegated to the margins.

The campaign against “historical nihilism” has intensified over the last decade. In April 2021, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s internet regulator, announced it had set up a special hotline for netizens to report instances of historical nihilism online, including attacks on the party’s leadership and policies. By the following month, they claimed they had already identified and deleted at least two million posts containing “harmful” discussions of history.

The government has introduced new laws to regulate the discussion of history, including legislation that makes it a criminal offense to “defame” or “slander” the country’s heroes and martyrs, making it increasingly dangerous to challenge the party’s narrative. In May 2022, for instance, former journalist Luo Changping, was jailed for a blog post questioning Chinese strategy during the Korean War.

…under Xi the official version of history is becoming the only permitted version, and the dominant narrative in official discourse and school history textbooks.

Xi has also presided over a campaign that urges party members to study history and oppose historical nihilism. He led the drafting of a new history resolution in 2021 – only the third such resolution in the party’s history – which effectively enshrines the official account of the party’s rise to power and the necessity of its rule. The crux of that argument was that without the CCP, “there would be no new China and no national rejuvenation.” In other words, the lesson the party seeks to draw from history is that China’s future success and the country’s security depends solely on the party’s continued rule.

The desire to draw selectively from the past and appeal to an idealized version of history is not unique to China, or, indeed, to authoritarian regimes. But under Xi the official version of history is becoming the only permitted version, and the dominant narrative in official discourse and school history textbooks. This matters far beyond the country’s borders because this distorted rendering of the past is being used to frame China’s contemporary challenges and territorial disputes – to justify its rapid military build-up, its increasingly assertive foreign policy —and to explain why it must not back down in the face of perceived threats to the country’s inviolable sovereignty, such as in the South China Sea, Hong Kong, or Taiwan.

“Who controls the past controls the future,” wrote George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. As Xi prepares to embark on a third five-year term in power at the Twentieth Party Congress this fall, it’s clear that he couldn’t agree more. History is a powerful resource for the Communist Party, and Xi has no intention of allowing control of it to slip from his grasp.

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