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China criminalizes the slander of its ‘heroes and martyrs,’ as it seeks to control history

China’s Communist Party has always understood the importance of policing its history.

On Friday, it tightened the screws another notch with a new law banning the slander of “heroes and martyrs” – figures drawn from wartime propaganda said to have given their lives in defense of the Communist Party or the nation.

Chinese schoolchildren are taught about the heroic deeds of figures who fought against the Japanese during the World War II, or who gave their lives for the Communist Party in its civil war with the Nationalists. Memorials to some of the most famous dot the country.

Now, it will be illegal to suggest those tales might not be wholly factual.

“Only the official narrative is allowed to exist,” said historian and critic Zhang Lifan. “But ‘What is the historical truth?’ – is not a question we ask now.”

The law is part of a much broader and long-standing attempt by the Communist Party to mold or rewrite history in its interests, that extends from obfuscating the causes and extent of the famine that killed tens of millions of people during the disastrous Great Leap Forward that began in 1958, or the chaos of the Cultural Revolution that followed, through to the determined attempt to erase from history the 1989 pro-democracy movement and subsequent deaths of many demonstrators.

The “Heroes and Martyrs Protection Act” was passed by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s largely rubber-stamp parliament, and goes into effect on May 1. It threatens unspecified “administrative penalties” or even “criminal sanctions” against those who damage memorials or “insult or slander heroes and martyrs.”

Yue Zhongming, a member of the standing committee, told a news conference the law was not intended to restrict academic freedom, but that this should not be used to harm the honor of the nation’s heroes.

“We often say there is no banned area of academic research, while there is a bottom line of law,” he told a news conference.

Zhang, for his part, maintained the law was largely meant to emphasize and protect the legitimacy of the Communist Party, and to tie up the idea of “loving the country” with “loving the party.”

The law was first submitted for deliberation last December, with its final draft expanded to include a provision to punish people who “glorify acts of war or invasion.”

State media said that provision referred to a handful of Chinese who have taken to dressing up in Japanese World War II army uniforms, and photographing themselves at famous wartime sites or memorials. The so-called “spiritually Japanese” movement is thought to be a small group of people fascinated with that country’s war-era militarism: a group that Foreign Minister Wang Yi referred to as “scum” at a recent news conference.

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