Beijing’s Rewriting History Again – Winston Smith Lives
Posted: August 16th, 2010 | 1 Comment »Officially – the Orwellian named Revision Project on Twenty-Four Histories and the Draft History of the Qing (ultimately set to be fully rewritten by 2015) is rewriting the official history – The Twenty-Four Histories – a collection of Chinese historical books covering a period of proto-history and history from 3,000 BC to the Ming Dynasty in the 17th century. The entire set contains about 40 million words. The Draft History of Qing covers the Qing Dynasty from 1616 to 1911.
Problem is history keeps changing – the first historical revision took 20 years and ended in 1958 – then came the Cultural Revolution, not a good time to be a historian in China (or anything else really). So, when considering Chinese history, or any history for that matter, take note of the guidelines just issued by the Revision Project on Twenty-Four Histories and the Draft History of the Qing:
(NB: all matters of historical reinterpretation were submitted to Wen Jiabao and approved by him personally*Â – I kid you not
- All sentences used to praise feudal kings, generals and ministers should not end with exclamation marks
- texts describing peasant uprisings should be reduced to a single paragraph
- it is now official that ‘the Cultural Revolution brought great calamity to the country and resulted in massive losses to the people.’
- the CR ‘cleansed the government of “liberal bourgeoisie’ to prevent China’s return to capitalism.’
According to an interview The Beijing News conducted with Xu Jun, general editor of Zhonghua Books, which publishes the histories, the directive about the exclamation marks was given in 1967. And at the same time, it was decided to set texts concerning peasant uprisings in a timeline-like format, to accentuate them, rather than recording them in continuous paragraphs like the rest of the text. Xu says that both of these editorial decisions have been completely eliminated in the present revision.