By Andrew Higgins, Published: May 26

BEIJING Chinas Communist Party has finally got its story straight. It took 16 years of editing and four extensive rewrites. Chinese leaders, otherwise preoccupied with running a rising superpower, kibitzed throughout. I never thought it would take so long, said Shi Zhongquan, who helped craft what the party hopes will be the final word on some of the most politically sensitive and also bloodiest episodes of Chinas recent history a new 1,074-page account of the partys early decades in power. As China races into the future, the Communist Party which marks its 90th birthday this July still takes the past, especially its own, very seriously. Writing history is not easy, said Shi, a veteran party historian. It gets particularly hard when it includes not only two of the past centurys most lethal man-made catastrophes the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution but also a modest but now ticklish upset back in 1962 the disgrace of Xi Zhongxun, the father of Xi Jinping, Chinas current vice president and leader-in-waiting. Its an old communist joke that Marxists can predict the future, but the past is more difficult, said Roderick Macfarquhar, a Harvard University scholar and leading authority on Chinese politics under Mao Zedong, who died in 1976. The past, added Macfarquhar, is important because it legitimates the present and what went wrong then has to be justified now. The party published its first official history 20 years ago but ended the story with Maos conquest of China in 1949. It has now ventured into far more treacherous territory with the January publication of History of the Chinese Communist Party, Volume 2 (1949-1978), which continues the saga until the year Deng Xiaoping started undoing much of Maos legacy. As China gears up to mark the July anniversary of the partys founding in 1921, history has become a boom industry. Nobody outside a tiny group of die-hard Maoists wants to revive communes, class struggle and brutal purges. But the party is hammering a message it views as crucial to its grip on power: Chinas surging economy and growing international clout are entirely the fruit of uninterrupted one-party rule. The state poured nearly $400 million into a new National Museum stuffed with revolutionary memorabilia, and millions more into The Founding of a Party, a star-studded epic movie due to be released soon. Chinese TV stations, meanwhile, have been told to yank cop shows and focus on airing dramas about party history instead. Shaping history is particularly important to Chinas so-called princelings, the offspring of Maos comrades. Having secured influence and often wealth on the basis of their family connections, members of this small but powerful group celebrate a wart-free version of the past that boosts their own status and sidesteps their parents role as enforcers and then victims of party brutality.

Xi, the Politburo member who is due to take over as leader of the party next year and whose father was purged by Mao in 1962, has been particularly active in stressing the need to get history right. In a keynote address at a history work conference last summer, he called on all party members now numbering nearly 80 million to resolutely combat the wrong tendency to distort and smear the partys history. (He didnt comment on his dad.) Also weighing history has been the son of Liu Shaoqi, a former Chinese president who died in 1969 after being denied medical treatment, having been purged by Mao during the Cultural Revolution. The son, military officer Liu Yuan, wrote in a preface to a new book that the Party has been repeatedly betrayed by general secretaries, both in and outside the country, recently and in the past. Mao, whose portrait still hangs above the main gate to the Forbidden City, has taken a beating in recent years from books all now banned in China that portray him variously as a megalomaniac, sex maniac and mass murderer. Shi, a former deputy director of the Party History Research Center, acknowledged wide differences of opinion among scholars, both Chinese and foreign, but said the party was not budging from the line it first fixed in 1981 that Mao made gross mistakes but, overall, did far more good than harm. You cant attack Mao and not attack the Chinese Communist Party, explained Shi. So touchy is the party about its past that the new history Shi helped edit had to be vetted by 64 different party and state bodies, including the Peoples Liberation Army. An initial draft took just four years to finish, but that didnt pass muster with the leadership. It took another 12 years before the Politburo finally signed off on a finished text. This, according to an editors note, followed clear demands regarding revisions from party chief Hu Jintao, his heir apparent Xi, and vice president Zeng Qinghong. The whole process lasted so long that more than a dozen of the scholars involved at the start passed away before publication. Of an original trio of three senior editors, Shi, now 73, is the only one still alive. The leaderships close attention has at least helped boost sales: The two-volume text topped the Beijing News bestseller list for more than a month, thanks to bulk orders from party units, which have been ordered to study the work. Regular historians sniff at the whole venture: This is politics and propaganda, said Yang Kuisong, a prominent history professor in Beijing. I have no interest in the topic. Unlike Chinas recently opened National Museum and other party-sponsored excursions into the past, however, the official history doesnt simply trumpet triumphs such as Chinas first atom bomb test in 1964. It also tackles the partys painful episodes. The most sensitive period to write about, according to Shi, was not the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, which the party long ago declared a disaster and blamed on the so-called Gang of

Four, but the decade before. That was when Mao first turned on many of his former allies, first intellectuals during the so-called anti-rightists campaign, and then senior party officials, including Xi Zhongxun, the father of Xi Jinping, the all-but-certain successor to President Hu Jintao. An early revolutionary and a vice premier, Xi Zhongxun fell from favor in 1962 amid calls by Mao to step up class struggle against those accused of seeking to restore capitalism. Xi, who vanished from public view for 16 years, got caught up in an obscure internal feud over a novel called Liu Zhi Dan. Mao saw the book as part of an alleged plot to rehabilitate Gao Gang, an earlier purge victim who killed himself. The new official party history skirts details of the saga and blames Xis downfall mostly on the machinations of Maos security chief, Kang Sheng. Branding Xi and others as members an antiParty clique was totally wrong, the history says. Xi was finally rehabilitated after Maos death. In a lengthy discussion of the Great Leap Forward, a ruinous crash program of industrialization and rural collectivization launched in 1958, the party history acknowledges great suffering and even notes that because of food shortages and illness, Chinas population in 1960 fell by 10 million. But, claiming that Maos goal throughout was basically the same as that of Chinas current leadership, it says he was driven by a desire to change a picture of poverty and backwardness and make China grow rich and strong so it could use its own strength to stand tall in the forest of nations. Mao, according to the partys version of events, realized relatively early through preliminary investigation and research that there were problems in (the Great Leap) movement and worked hard to correct them. Frank Dikkoter, a Dutch scholar who last year published a study of the period, Maos Great Famine, dismissed this as barefaced lie. Mao, he said, was indeed aware of the starvation caused by his policies but pressed on, with the result that as many as 45 million people perished. Not recorded in the official history is a 1959 comment by Mao that Dikotter unearthed from a Chinese provincial archive: It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill. Deconstructing Chinas official history A look at the China Communist Partys take on politically sensitive events compared with how they are interpreted by outside historians: 1950 The Korean War

Official version from new Chinese Communist Party History On the 25 of June 1950, civil war broke out in Korea. The United States immediately decided to interfere militarily and to extend the scope of this interference to areas of Asia beyond Korea. Consensus view of Western and independent Chinese historians The Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950, after a dawn invasion of U.S.-backed South Korea by Chinas ally, North Korea. The U.S. immediately went to the United Nations Security Council, which condemned the invasion and then urged member states to support South Korea. 1958-61 The Great Leap Forward Official version from new Chinese Communist Party History Extreme shortages of grain, oils, vegetables and non-staple foodstuffs gravely damaged the health and lives of the masses. Edema occurred among village residents in many areas and the number of people suffering from hepatitis and gynecological diseases also rose. Consensus view of Western and independent Chinese historians Starvation, disease and brutal repression by party officials killed tens of millions of Chinese, with some villages resorting to cannibalism. Hepatitis was a problem but afflicted mostly privileged urban residents. All forms of disease from leprosy to malaria skyrocketed. Mao Zedongs policies claimed more victims than the Holocaust or Ukraines famine under Stalin. 1962 Purge of Xi Zhongxun and others at party conclave Official version from new Chinese Communist Party History This meeting incorrectly launched criticism of the so-called dark wind, the individual farming wind, and the rehabilitation wind. This caused serious negative consequences for the Party. Xi Zhongxun and others were declared an anti-Party clique seeking the rehabilitation of Gao Gang. The judgement that this was a struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie was a completely wrong assessment of the nature of the situation. Consensus view of Western and independent Chinese historians Maos purge of Xu Zhongxun in 1962 was not an aberration but a harbinger of bigger and far more brutal purges during the Cultural revolution, launched four years later. Xi had worked closely in the past with Gao Gang, a purged senior party official who killed himself in 1954, but what triggered his disgrace in 1962 is still not clear.

1969 Cultural Revolution and the death of purged president Liu Shaoqi Official version from new Chinese Communist Party History In October 1969, Liu Shaoqi, seriously sick, was sent to Kaifeng, Henan Province and, on November 12, he died from illness at his place of captivity still burdened with false charges. The number of cases wrongly judged in connection to Liu Shaoqis unjust case reached 26,000 and touched more than 28,000 people. The formation of Liu Shaoqis unjust case gave the party its most painful lesson since the enlargement of the campaign against counter-revolutionaries in the 1930s. Consensus view of Western and independent Chinese historians Liu Shaoqis death followed a long, brutal and vindictive campaign against the former Chinese president orchestrated by Mao Zedong, who branded him Chinas number one capitalist roader. Doctors requested drugs to treat Liu, who suffered from diabetes, high blood pressure and other ailments, but they were barred from providing treatment. Left untended, Liu contracted pneumonia and died. The party kept his death secret from the general public for 10 years and has still not given a full account of what happened, or clarified Maos exact role in Lius death. 10.0451