China’s cyber regulator recently set up platforms for people to report “distortions of the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), attacks on CCP leaders and the denigration of heroes and martyrs.” It quotes the CCP’s General Secretary Xi Jinping who once emphasized the need to “clearly oppose historical nihilism.”
In the modern Chinese Communist’s discourse, “historical nihilism” is a term that refers to the criticism of the socialist system or the leadership of the CCP. Xi Jinping once said that the key of “historical nihilism” is to deny fundamentally the leading position of Marxism and the historical inevitability of China’s socialist path, and to deny the leadership of the CCP.
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the nation’s top cyber regulator, recently circulated an article on its WeChat public account. “Some people with ulterior motives, under the banner of so-called ‘reflecting on history’ and ‘recovering the truth,’ have been spreading false remarks of historical nihilism by taking things out of context and making things up out of nothing.” The article said, “They maliciously distort, denigrate and deny the history of the party, the state and the military, in an attempt to confuse people.”
CAC’s report center opened a channel for reporting “harmful information related to historical nihilism” on its official website, its smartphone apps and its telephone hotline. Accepted contents include: distorting the history of the CCP and China, attacking the CCP leadership and its ideology and policies, denigrating heroes and martyrs, and denying the traditional Chinese culture, revolutionary culture and advanced socialist culture.
Xi Jinping attaches much importance to the education of CCP history. In one meeting in 2013, he mentioned that one reason behind the collapse of the Soviet Union was the denial of the Soviet Union, the denial of the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the denial of Lenin and Stalin, and historical nihilism. In another meeting in February this year, he said, “One must clearly oppose historical nihilism, strengthen ideological guidance and theoretical analysis and clarify the ambiguous knowledge and one-sided understanding of some major issues of the party’s history.”
Source: Central News Agency, April 11, 2021
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/acn/202104110163.aspx