The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has set up a hotline for people to report each other to the authorities for failing to toe the party's freshly revised line on matters of history. The Cyberspace Administration said in a post to its official Weibo account on April 9 that people should use the number "to report erroneous online remarks relating to historical nihilism." The move is to "create a good public opinion environment" regarding China's history since the CCP took power in 1949, the post said. To help those who may be unsure of which opinions are the "correct" ones, the CCP has also published a handy guide in the form of a book titled A Brief History of the Communist Party of China.
Published to mark the party's centenary this year, the revised history plays down the cautious diplomatic approach of late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in the wake of international sanctions following the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, instead highlighting his comments to former U.S. president Richard Nixon in November 2019. Deng told Nixon that China would never "beg" for sanctions to be lifted, the book says.
The U.S. and Europe imposed an arms embargo on China after the People's Liberation Army (PLA) attached unarmed civilians with machine guns and tanks in an operation that ended weeks of pro-democracy protests on Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.
