What if the Chinese government suffered from Wikileaks? In the New York Review of Books, Perry Link ponders this hypothetical as the Party wrestles to keep control of history and faces its own problems with leaked documents and a sudden boomlet in memoirs by departed (and soon-to-be departed) leaders trying to put a final spin on their legacies as they make their way up the stairs to meet Marx.
At issue is the power of archives and memory. Once opened, archives offer historians, scholars, journalists, researchers and all manner of other interested parties access to the primary stuff from which narratives are constructed. Limiting access to this information is essential for any group that seeks to maintain a particular narrative, all the more so if the archive contains materials which complicate or contradict that narrative.
George Orwell famously wrote, “He who controls the past, controls the present. He who controls the present, controls the future.” A corollary to Orwell is: He who controls the archives — the actual room with the paper or the server with the emails — has a huge advantage in controlling that past.
Professor Link concludes:
Broadly speaking there are two kinds of reasons why Chinese