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the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, these and other aspects of the party’s past were not considered utterly taboo, as long as the discussion did not lead to serious challenges to orthodox historical interpretations. According to the policies set down under Xi Jinping’s leadership, talking in classrooms about Mao’s errors is now forbidden.25

The drive to inculcate a national amnesia on the worst abuses of the Communist era is not limited to university courses. Commentary and discussion in the media and on the internet are also heavily censored, especially on anniversary days when, in normal societies, problematic events of the past are remembered and debated.26 The most sensitive anniversary, of course, falls on June 4, marking the deadly 1989 crackdown on prodemocracy protests in Tiananmen Square. Even the most oblique or coded reference to that date on social media is quickly censored.

There are no museums devoted the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward. The archives of the Cultural Revolution period are mainly closed to researchers. Chinese historians have made some important breakthroughs, but can discuss their findings only with small groups of peers.

The Communist Party’s refusal to come to terms with the crimes of the Mao era has enabled a revival of the former leader’s personality cult that has captured the support of millions of Chinese. As Jamil Anderlini wrote in the Financial Times, Mao has come to be seen as a symbol of a “simpler, fairer society—a time when everyone was poorer but at least they were equally poor.”27 Xi and his colleagues have actively promoted Maoist images, songs, and propaganda themes as ornaments of Chinese nationalism, and used Mao-style tactics and terminology in their drive for ideological discipline and political loyalty.

The melding of nationalism and reverence for Mao is no accident. According to the regime’s updated historical narrative, China was subjugated by foreign powers for more than a century until the party took power in 1949 and restored the country’s national greatness. Admitting Mao’s abuses would mean admitting that the first three decades of Communist rule left China poor, isolated, and traumatized, and that only the partial abandonment of party doctrine and control allowed the country to prosper.

A side effect of the party’s appropriation of Chinese nationalism is a renewed hostility toward the foreign powers that kept China weak before Communist rule. Basic history textbooks—in addition to omitting or distorting the mistakes, failures, and criminal acts of the Communist leadership—focus on China’s persecution at the hands of outsiders, especially Japan. Some Chinese critics worry that the teaching of history is cultivating an alarming degree of xenophobia and jingoism.28

History held hostage
In much of the world today, there are or have been major efforts to confront uncomfortable truths about the past. This is certainly true of Germany and South Africa. Latin American countries like Chile and Argentina have probed the histories of ugly conflicts between military juntas and Marxist revolutionaries. In China’s own backyard, South Korea and Taiwan have moved to address the complex legacies, including outright crimes, of dictators.

The process of accounting for the mistakes and crimes of earlier decades can raise a tangle of ethical and emotional challenges in any country. But resistance to a full examination of the past is especially bitter in societies where communism held sway. In China, the heirs of Mao still control the state, and the very legitimacy of the system is built on a veneration of the Great Helmsman. In Russia, the Putin leadership praises the achievements of Stalin and aspires to the superpower status of the Soviet Union. A consequence of this ahistorical nostalgia is that in Russia today, 26 percent of those polled by Levada believe that Stalinist repression was necessary; a decade ago, the figure was just 9 percent. Likewise, only 45 percent told Levada that political persecution was a crime; in 2007, the figure was 72 percent.29

The communist system was responsible for four of the most destructive episodes of the 20th century: Stalin’s purges, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Cambodian genocide. Add to this the persecutions inflicted on the people of the Baltic states, Eastern Europeans, Cubans, North Koreans, and many others, and the population affected by mass killings and misery swells even further. While few people today admire totalitarian Marxism as a governing system, there is a reluctance to reject it with the same moral clarity as in assessments of Nazism. Scholars, not to mention political figures, who express even modest admiration for Hitler are immediately and properly condemned. As long as Stalin and Mao, two of history’s worst mass murderers, escape similar opprobrium in their own countries, a reckoning with historical truth and an understanding of its lessons will be postponed.

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