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 officials have been so assiduous in guarding archives. One is that the prestige of the regime as a whole depends upon the image of the Party as heroic, patriotic, and the definition of modern China. The young must be taught to love the Party. Stories about internecine strife? About causing a huge famine? The people might not love us anymore, and might rebel.
The other kind of reason is much more personal. Each official has to watch out for his or her own self and family. A political “mistake” can ruin your career, even land you in prison, and archives are where your enemies can go to look for grounds to charge you with “mistakes”. Mao allowed his people to open archives to look for material on Liu Shaoqi and other enemies during the Cultural Revolution; a few years later archives were opened again as people looked for material on the Maoist “Gang of Four.”
The anonymous reporter who leaked the contents of the July 21 meeting commented on a looming atmosphere of demise at the meeting. The underlying mood, he suggested, was, We had better get control of these archives, and perhaps destroy them, before a day of reckoning is upon us.
As Beijing swirls with rumors about the ill-health of several former leaders, that day of reckoning may be closer than we think. A true history of Modern China cannot be written without access to these archives, if they are lost, so too is the ability of historians and future generations to remember and assess the legacy of the CCP.
Perhaps this is why the leaders are so worried.
[...] This post was Twitted by alexco [...]
I guarantee you that if they did make the call to destroy the archives, or merely selectively weed them to remove embarrassing documents, then leaks would be the result. Whilst the documents sit in secret archives nobody will be in a hurry to expose them, but a wholesale destruction of them would inevitably cause some of them to be rescued and made public.
It is not a bad idea. The problem is that are there any controversial information from China that we didn’t know about?