Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, July 01, 2011

One entertaining version of Party history

As I was getting ready to head out on a holiday weekend, I came across Jeremiah Jenne's blog post at Jottings from the Granite Studio. He's an American historian who is teaching in China and finishing his thesis.

In honor of the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party in China, he offers this version of its history supplemented by references to Mad Men. It was too good not to pass on before I left the tentacles of the Internet.

It's pretty obvious that historian Jenne is personally insulted by the kind of history written the Party propagandists in China.

It’s a Mad Mad 90th Anniversary

Two things happened this summer. The CCP celebrated its 90th anniversary and Mad Men decided to take the year off. The truth is, the world’s longest running Communist government has a lot in common with an American show celebrating naked capitalism and martinis…

Mao and Don Draper were chain-smoking misogynistic misanthropes with shady pasts who rose to prominence by being good ideas men and not a little bit ruthless. Politics aside, I bet they could have hung a bit…

“I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie, there is no system. The universe is indifferent.”

For all the Marxist educational materials and classes foisted upon China’s students and the forests of trees felled to supply the paper for endless government reports on socialist theory and scientific development, the real secret of the CCP is this: There is no plan and there never was…

“Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”

A defining feature of the Party… has been its casual relationship with History.[3] In particular, its ability to convince people to overlook the past, no matter what kind of historical wreckage might still be smoldering in the rear-view mirror…

If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.

There’s little difference between the advertising industry and the Communist propaganda machine. They’re just selling different products. For 90 years the CCP has survived by training a steady fire hose of bullshit at its supporters and convincing those same supporters that it’s all just chocolate pudding with Chinese characteristics. And they’ve gotten better at it over time…

It wasn’t a lie, it was ineptitude with insufficient cover.

Which brings me back to history. The key to the Party’s hold on power is its control of its own story. I’ve used this quotation before, but on a day when my television is an endless loop of self-congratulatory propagandistic bullshit, it is worth repeating George Orwell’s famous dictum that ‘He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.’ The party is afraid of many things, but most of all it is afraid of losing control of its own past. The recent multi-volume History of the CPC reads like an inoculation, rather than ignore dark moments in the Party’s history, traumatic events are papered over with passive grammar and a banal platitudes. Mistakes were made. Enemies were among us. Shit happens.[8]

It’s getting harder and harder for the Party to lie, to simply make shit up and hope to get away with it. But at the same time, they are getting smarter about how they go about massaging the past, augmenting the mythology with modern media, and working overtime to avoid any counter-programming or competing messages. But that’s what it has to do if it wants to stay in power for another 90 years…