Sky Views: China fighting war you probably won't hear about

Sky Views: China fighting war you probably won't hear about

Katie Stallard, Asia Correspondent

Every Chinese schoolchild learns about the country's suffering during the "eight-year war of resistance against Japanese aggression".

Known elsewhere as the second Sino-Japanese War, it was generally considered to have lasted from 1937 to 1945.

Until now.

Earlier this month, the Communist Party quietly changed the start date, adding six years to the length.


The history textbooks are being rewritten and, from this spring, the war will officially begin in 1931.

From now on it will be known as "The 14-year Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression".

As well as revising the duration, the Ministry of Education has ordered teachers to emphasise the "leading role" of the Communist Party in fighting the war.

And that's the real point here.

Buried in the bureaucratese of an edict to the nation's schools, is an insight into the fundamental question facing the leaders of the world's second largest economy: How long will the Communist Party rule China?

China's Communist Party is once again rewriting its past in an attempt to secure its political future.

If this sounds like journalistic hyperbole, it's not.

It's the same question the Party has been asking itself since the tanks left Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Deng Xiaoping, then paramount leader, was faced with a crisis of legitimacy: What was the role of the Communist Party in an increasingly non-communist China?

The old ideology was no longer enough.

Communist regimes were crumbling across eastern Europe. Blue jeans and Coca Cola had arrived in Beijing. Class struggle was no longer a rallying cry.

How could Deng shore up the nation's belief in the Party?

The answer he arrived at was education - a new curriculum, which would put the Communist Party and the necessity of its leadership at the heart of the national story.

Image: China is rewriting the history of the Sino-Japanese War

"Our biggest mistake," he told "officers enforcing martial law" in Beijing on 9 June, 1989, "was made in the field of education, primarily in ideological and political education".

What followed became known as the Patriotic Education Campaign.

The core message was outlined in a letter to the Party's official newspaper, the People's Daily, in 1991.

First and foremost, General Secretary Jiang Zemin said, they should concentrate on the Chinese people's "bullying and humiliation" at the hands of foreign powers.

Perhaps most importantly, he continued, they should focus on the centrality of the Communist Party to ending that humiliation, and ensuring the Chinese people could not be bullied again.

It might not have been obvious overseas.

As the government was doubling down on patriotic education at home, from the outside it looked like a country that was accelerating economic reforms, and embracing mass privatisations. Plenty of smart people thought they knew exactly where China was heading.

And from the brink of crisis came two decades of vertiginous growth, and an even more tangible reason to believe.

Economics displaced politics as a powerful new source of legitimacy.

But as China's economic success story now stalls, its current leaders appear to be dusting off Deng and Jiang's patriotic playbook.

As well as revising the history textbooks, the latest programme includes patriotic films, TV shows, cartoons for children, and new national holidays to commemorate the country's martyrs and massacres past.

Chinese citizens who try to tell a different story are increasingly censored or silenced.

"History is the best textbook," President Xi Jinping once said, "History is history, and facts are facts - nobody can change history and facts."

Nobody, that is, apart from the Communist Party, which is once again rewriting its past in an attempt to secure its political future.

History will show how well that works.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Sky News editors and correspondents, published every morning.

Previously on Sky Views: Tom Cheshire: What's behind Emoji's global success