HISTORY HAS been trotted out recently by both domestic defenders and international critics of Chinese Communist Party rule. But while both groups have stressed the value of looking back roughly 70 years, they have drawn sharply different conclusions from what they see.
When supporters of the regime have invoked the 1930s, they've tended to focus on the Nanjing massacre, the 70th anniversary of which will fall in December. They see that tragedy -- the six-week-long orgy of death and destruction after the city fell to the Japanese in December 1937 -- as symbolic of how much the Chinese suffered before the communist era as a result of Japan's imperialist aims and the weak Chinese state. The lesson they draw: Keep China strong, even if that requires forfeiting some individual freedom.
Meanwhile, foreign critics of today's China have adopted the Berlin Olympics of 1936 as their favorite historical analogy. They argue that was the year when the international community made the grave mistake -- which they insist is about to be repeated with the 2008 Beijing Games -- of helping to legitimize a brutal dictatorship. The lesson they draw: Don't ever make deals with repressive regimes.
I would argue that this kind of historical reductionism is not terribly useful, no matter which side is doing it. If one is truly interested in looking backward -- not to help Beijing play the nationalism card or to bolster calls for a 2008 Olympic boycott, but simply to understand today's China -- it is important to do so in a way that is not so simplistic.
It's true that the 1930s were a fascinating period in China, and one with interesting parallels to our own time.
China was governed in those days by an authoritarian party that had repudiated some key ideals of its first great leader -- much as the Chinese Communist Party has today. At that time, the Nationalists had placed founding father Sun Yat-sen's anti-imperialist ideology on the back burner as Chiang Kai-shek made extermination of the communists his top priority. The contemporary parallel, of course, is the Communist Party's abandonment of Mao Tse-tung's anti-capitalist teachings.
Then, as now, this ideological shift did not mean that the regime stopped making symbolic use of its most famous former leader. Mao's giant portrait still looks down on Tiananmen Square; in the 1930s, Nationalist Party officials often bowed before Sun's image.
