RE: China's 1984 'Memory Hole' Censorship Factories to Erase History
A little scoop from the inside (from someone who has been living in China since 2008). I've taught at various levels here (esp. middle and high school).
First, a quick fact/observation. Roughly 70% of the entire internet is inaccessible from China without a VPN (which speaks volumes).
Oddly, Wikipedia Chinese version is banned while the English version is commonly (but not always) accessible.
In line with the theme of your article, at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018 I taught a course to high school students which focused on George Orwell's 1984. We covered all the related themes and I must tell you that even youngsters (even 7th graders I had previously taught) are well aware of more that you would think, despite massive censorship and selective history. These are very bright young minds (at least in the better/top-rated public and private schools), despite the implied limitations of the archaic education system.
I will give you a nice sampling of an exposé written by one of my high school students in my 1984 course:
17 year old Chinese student destroys the White Helmets as complete fraud in steeming Exposé.
So, just something to think about. Don't think that even tough these dystopian forces are at play, that the cleverness of Chinese youth isn't completely subdued by their Communist overlords and educational shackles.
There is hope, after all.
And I think that the more the current power structure continues to impose ever increasing dystopian surveillance-and-control measures, the more they are sealing their destiny and digging their graves as a mere tiny speckle of dust in the Middle Kingdom's 5,000 year history.
Nice to meet another expat in China, and it's rare to meet one who's been here longer than me. I've been here continuously since 2014, and in and out since 2012. I got here on my first longer-than-visit in Fall 2012, just in time to see "Xi Dada" sworn in and even then I could pick up on how fast things changed.
All that said, I've had students who have ripped the lid off the lies as well, but there's a problem. The only kids I've had who could do that, were the children of Party elites (as is evident by the fact that I'm able to even teach, say, Orwell's literature to them in the first place while their peers are still dumbly and mindlessly memorizing Confucian texts) who are going to grow up benefitting from the very system we're vainly hoping that their cleverness will enable them to clean up. Why would they bite the hand that's feeding them?
I basically lost hope when I switched to a public school in Beijing and saw what is happening to the rank and file of their education system. You talk about "learning the truth?" These kids haven't even learned the lies yet. At my middle school, I was specifically told by the principal "these kids are going to fail the Zhongkao and never go to high school and that's okay because their parents were poor so they deserve to be poor all their lives as well." They're not learning anything, true, false or otherwise. They're being trained to be domestic servants, laborers, and basically Human cattle. If we continue the 1984 analogy (which is pretty freaking accurate), they're the proles, and as Winston Smith learned in his conversation with the poor sap in the tavern who just wanted a pint, there's no hope to be found in them.
Also, as a side note, take another look at the "5,000 year history" cliche. Nothing prior to Qinshihuang could even remotely be called "Chinese." Saying that the kingdoms before him were Chinese is like calling Powhatan and Hiawatha American. "2,500 year history with frequent breaks" is more accurate.
Holy fuck. Talk about class warfare when that's supposed to be "gone" with Communism... what a joke. That's what communism ends up becoming every time it's tried out it seems. Just greater class divide and more enslavement. The Party of 1984 is exactly Communism that Orwell was alluding to.
Too true. Of course, the reason China has outlasted most of the world's other Communist Parties is that they are quite well aware of the fact that they're not working toward any kind of egalitarianism, whereas previous Communist regimes pretended they were. The so-called "Communist" Party of China rarely ever gave more than lip-service (albeit fanatical lip-service) to Marxist theory, which is really the only reason they've lasted longer than the USSR did.
They used the terminology of Communism because they learned from Zhongshan's Republic that they had to make it sound modern and hip, but it was really more of a reversion to China's ancient Imperial system (and when I say "ancient," the Mao era more closely resembled the Qin or Shang Dynasties than anything else) with new labels ("communes" instead of "shared households," "the Party" instead of "the Mandarinate," and "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" instead of "Mandate of Heaven").
There's a joke here in Beijing.
"What does 'China'stand for? Communist Headquarters In Name Alone."
The fact that Taiwan has actually achieved something that's pretty close to a free society and in doing so has actually achieved a greater living standard than any part of the Mainland except the coast, and they did it all by outright rejecting Marx and more-or-less embracing Western ideals (with a few alterations made for their own cultural legacy of course), absolutely infuriates the neocomms.
Well that's good that there are still some sharp minds outwitting the manipulation and psyop at the national level. Same over seas ;) Good work being done in your class!