Cultural Revolution forgotten, China set to repeat history
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Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution, which lasted 10 years and was probably the darkest nightmare in its history, as well as one of the most appalling exhibitions of human evil in world history.
This sensitive and unwelcome occasion has been greeted by official silence inside mainland China and intensive discussions outside, which makes me wonder whose Cultural Revolution was it?
For decades, the Communist Party has been doing its utmost to bury this shameful memory, while the West’s interests in exposing the shameful scar have never faded.
And, though it happened in China, most research on the Cultural Revolution has been done in the West. In other words, the Chinese nation paid the bloody cost, but the West learned the lessons. What a pity for China!
The Cultural Revolution was indeed a shame for the Chinese nation, but that shame only deepens as we try to conceal it with self-deception. “Forgetting history is a betrayal, and denying a crime is to repeat a crime,” President Xi Jinping has said. Quite so.
Sun Xi
Singapore
