Introduction: History as Governing Ideology
To understand how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is in the 21st century, one must look into its history of the dynasties in the past. Scholars who start to analyse the PRC from 1949 will always struggle to understand that China needs to be understood from the Zhou dynasty’s ritual cosmology to the Tang dynasty imperial grandeur and the disastrous upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries. China stands apart from the majority of modern great powers not just because of the age of its civilisation but also because of the extent to which its history has been deliberately used as a tool of political power. The focus of the chapter is on how historical memory functions as a structural variable in Chinese politics, shattering the trauma of the “Century of humiliation” leading to the foundation for present-day domestic legitimation and foreign policy projections. The writing below can be divided into three academic discussions.
