For successive Chinese regimes -- imperial, republican and communist -- history has been a political weapon, fashioned and circulated in a manner that serves the purposes of the rulers. Objective truth and inquiry are positively dangerous. As a poster from the Cultural Revolution might have put it:
denounce your predecessors, sing your own praises, raise up conve-nient icons, ignore troubling facts.
This, inevitably, leads to outbursts of countervailing iconoclasm from those outside the system, in which the official version is ruthlessly swept aside in one-dimensional denunciation. Though Sun Shuyun and Julia Lovell are revisionists, both tread a more subtle, layered course in their excellent books on two of China's major icons, the Long March of 1934 and the Great Wall.
The first is the founding story of the communist regime, a poem to communism as the French writer, Sinologue and politician Alain Peyrefitte put it. The second is a national symbol recognized round the world. Together, they epitomize what the rulers of the world's most populous nation would like their country to be: strong, self-reliant and resolute.
As the two authors show, the truth behind the myth is a lot more complex than the facile icono-graphy that surrounds their subjects. Both books are valuable not only in setting out a convincing account of reality, but also in showing how and why the official version was built -- and the tensions that this has caused for those who know what actually happened.
As with Dunkirk, the Long March was spun from a defeat into a triumph and so can be dismissed as another Maoist whopper. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's recent biography of Mao Zedong (毛澤東)posits that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) leader Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), let the Red Army escape as part of a deal with Stalin, though it was, rather, local warlords who stood aside so as not to give Chiang a pretext to send his soldiers into their domains.
Sun Shuyun has done an impressive job of on-the-ground reporting, interweaving the memories of survivors to build up the narrative as the communists leave their base in Jiangxi province, undergo a devastating attack and wander through mountains, jungles, grasslands and swamps before reaching the caves in the northern country.
There they stayed until their army won the civil war that took China for communism in 1949.
Mao makes appearances at key points, but this is a book built up from the evidence of the foot soldiers of the revolution. Though some survivors remain true believers and few regret having participated, the tone of their vivid, often touching, memories strikes a different chord from the one-note heroism faithfully retailed so often by Western writers.
In the end desertions cost the communists more troops than deaths in battle.
The role of women is brought out strongly; their privations along the route were even worse than those of the male soldiers.
Groundbreaking reporting on female fighters leads to a dramatic account of a doomed post-March expedition to the west of China that fell victim to Mao's machinations and ended with the Red Army women captured, raped and forced into warlord concubinage.
For whichever party has been in power, the line on the Great Wall has been an unconquerable barrier 2,000 years old and more than 6,437km long.
Adopted by Mao as a symbol of his country's glory, it was proclaimed to be the only feature on Earth that could be seen from the Moon.
As Julia Lovell demonstrates, the myth is as full of holes as the ruined parts of the structure. The most visited section of the wall is far more recent and the construction was never continuous or impregnable.
Raiders simply rode to the end of a stretch and poured down on northern China. In a final blow, a Chinese astronaut returned from space in 2003 to report that he had been unable to see it.
But, as Lovell observes, its "antiquity and efficacy are not
historical hypotheses to be tested and investigated, but rather truths to be accepted and venerated."
Skewering the myths, the book provides an excellent, fluent history of northern China and the dilemma of successive dynasties as to how to handle the rampaging raiders from its northern frontier.
But Lovell has a wider purpose. She presents the edifice of brick, stone and earth as a symbol of oppression as well as a source of patriotic pride. It comes to stand for China's uncertain relationship with the outside world and the determination of its rulers to exert authoritarian control over their people.
It is both a defense and a prison.
Behind both books lies an intriguing set of questions. Can a nation that depends for its growth and stability on engaging with the rest of the world continue to deny the truths of its past?
This raises the question: Does history matter, or does that very question say something about the mindset bred by centuries of official thought control?
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