Thread by @thetimes

#WorldAtFive🌍: The Communist Party is obsessed with the past, but its centenary celebrations suppress some of its defining moments like famine, purges, and the Tiananmen Square massacre, writes @tangdidi.
thetimes.co.uk/article/the-hi…

Instead, President Xi when speaking at the event invoked a history of international humiliation, poverty and struggle to rouse the Chinese people and bolster party support.

“Any attempt to deviate from the official narrative is described as “historical nihilism” and considered an attack on the party.” Says @tangdidi.

Before this year’s celebrations the party published The Brief History of the Chinese Communist Party. Absent from its 531 pages are the political purges, the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961, myriad uprisings and the ways they were crushed.

When a difficult topic was broached in the document, such as the recent Hong-Kong protests, they were presented in “a way that justifies the party’s actions at the time”.

The official narrative labels the 1989 pro-democracy Tiananmen protest as “political turmoil” and calls the military crackdown “a victory that safeguarded our country’s socialist powers, safeguarded the normal societal order and the fundamental interests of the people.”

Experts fear that the party will now apply the same indoctrination tactics, used to gloss over previous failings, in Hong Kong; Xi used his speech to vow to exercise “full governance” over the territory and ensure “social stability”.