China, Xinjiang and 'historical nihilism'

July 29, 2019

IN THE RECENTLY published government “white paper” entitled Historical Matters Concerning Xinjiang, official scholars recited a now familiar argument that the far northwestern region, routinely described by the foreign media as “restive”, was not only always-already a part of China, but is still becoming even more Chinese through an ongoing process of integration and national re-awakening. All this is happening despite the relatively “recent” encroachment by “hostile forces in and outside China, especially separatists, religious extremists and terrorists.”

The scholars argue that in Xinjiang, Chineseness actually preceded Islam, which was “implanted” on Chinese soil by Arab imperialists. This, of course, is a matter of interpretation, and depends on how you define Chinese. It depends on how you assess the status or independence of the various kingdoms and Khanates established by the Uighurs and other nationalities in Xinjiang over the centuries, and how you describe their sometimes complex relationships with the Chinese emperor.

But one thing is absolutely clear. It has become crucial for an ideologically revitalised China to put a progressive gloss on its hegemony in Xinjiang and to impose its own version of history on the region. It is equally vital that it describes its punitive labour camps in the region as “re-education” or “vocational training centres” - just as the Soviet Union did decades ago, and with much greater cynicism, when describing its own gulags. As a mere dumping ground for undesirables, the camps serve no historical purpose. As a vehicle to create a completely harmonised Uighur-Chinese citizen, they drive forward the goals of the Chinese revolution.

And this, it seems, is the purpose of a recent campaign in Chinese academic circles against a way of thinking they describe as “historical nihilism”. History cannot just be one damn thing after another, with no structure, no underlying telos. History cannot be just a violent, amoral and futile power struggle that goes on forever, rather like the one Rayne Kruger tells in his All Under Heaven: A Complete History of China. To support the very rationale and raison d’etre of the Chinese Communist Party, the Whiggish illusion of historical progress needs to be maintained.

The official publication of the China Academy of Social Sciences describes “historical nihilism” as a “blind” denial of the development process of human society as well as a denial of historical culture, ethnic culture, ethnic tradition and ethnic spirit, which already suggests China is serving two masters here - the Marxist concept of a “dialectical” historical process as well as a more traditional notion of nationalist reawakening.

It gives a series of examples. It includes people who say historical values must conform with “so-called values of freedom, democracy and human rights”, and who brand the revolution and the construction of the Chinese Communist Party as “wrong”. It includes people who believe the only genuine modernisation of a country is on “Western” lines. It also includes people who demean the history of the Communist Party as a tawdry struggle for power.

Historical nihilism either publicly proclaims "farewell to revolution', or publicly asserts that modernisation consists only of westernisation, or it tries to rewrite history using these preset values, describing Party history, national history and military history as an ambitious struggle for power, and international party struggles as a history of people's misery, and not even hesitating to falsify facts and tell lies in order to plant a history of filth and ugliness.   

And so, the historical nihilist hides his reactionary, anti-communist nature with “so-called” research and the “academic cloak'“ of being realistic and honest.

Its ways of deception include: obsessing over correcting facts and unearthing documents, a lack of subtlety, a lack of meaning and even "literature fetishism" and a "research addiction"; it is branded as "letting the facts speak for themselves" and being impartial and objectively neutral.

The historical nihilist re-evaluates national heroes by focusing on their flaws, publishing “private memoirs” and “private lives” of the type used to reassess Chairman Mao. Above all else, the historical nihilist regards history as an accident, as a result without a subject. One damn thing after another.

The Marxist view of history is derived from Hegel. The Hegelian idea was a reaction to the Enlightenment, and was an attempt to integrate rationalism with the idea of growth and change and development. It was an attempt to put life back together again, to racinate ourselves once more after our spiritual foundations had been shattered by cold, hard logic.

But where do those new foundations go? For Heidegger, it was the nation, a community bound by a shared being, by Blut und Boden. For the Marxists, it was history, or the ineluctable march of Progress as determined by the process of dialectical materialism. For China, it has become a combination of the two. For China’s ideologues, history has become the teleological unfolding of the forces of revolution and the glorification of the Chinese people, as defined and guided by the Chinese Communist Party.

In China, history represents the gradual unfolding of the Infallible Wisdom of Party Rule, give or take a few wrong turns caused by enemies of the people such as the Gang of Four. The Chinese Communist Party provides a spiritual-national leadership with a mission to secure the rebirth of China after centuries of eclipse. The millennia before the birth of the Chinese Communist Party were in effect a prelude or a foreword. The Taiping Rebellion, for example, was interpreted by Party theoreticians as a reflection of the revolutionary desires of the Chinese peasantry that ultimately failed because its leaders were not trained in the arts and intricacies of class struggle.

In Marxist-style history, the “meaning of the past can be grasped only from the vantage point of the expected ultimate fulfilment,” in the words of the great Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. That’s to say, to be preoccupied with the detail and minutiae of revolutionary history - to quibble about death tolls on Tian’anmen Square, or about the precise number of arrests made during the Cultural Revolution - is to engage in nihilism.

Foreign Policy described historical nihilism as a refusal to see history as something that can be plundered and falsified for political purposes. It reflects the idea that “historical truth” is a bourgeois fiction and it is therefore our duty to interpret it in ways that suits our political mission.

But it also demonstrates how fundamentally superstitious the Marxist enterprise can be. In Kolakowski’s words, it has become a spiritual kinship where “history is the binding force whereby a tribe identifies itself by opposition to the rest of the world.”

For those who drew their utopian dreams from Marxist ideology, history was no more than a pretext for believing in a quasi-natural inevitability that would soon transform their fantasies into reality. Messianic hopes justified all means, all forms of violence, which might bring millenarian happiness closer. Nothing in the present, and thus all the more emphatically nothing in the past, was of any significance; only the future mattered.

The historian Timothy Snyder in his introduction to Thinking the Twentieth Century says there is a difference between the "big truths, the beliefs about great causes and final ends which seem to require mendacity and sacrifice from time to time, and the small truths, the facts as they can be discovered." As the warped offspring of several different kinds of Hegelianism, the Chinese Communist Party is clearly talking about the “big truths” that allow it to construct a narrative of a historically inevitable movement leading a nation to its historically inevitable glory.   

But it is dangerous to overlook the small truths. Jean-Paul Sartre famously tied himself in knots trying to justify his faith in the Marxist-Leninist version of history even after the Soviet crackdown on Hungary in 1956. Sartre wrote, “Perhaps we live in a situation in which the injustice against one person no longer seems to apply.”

Albert Camus, always the clearer thinker, had a better explanation. The problem with this approach, he said, is that “the responsibility towards history dispenses one of responsibility towards human beings.”