China is really cranking the propaganda efforts up to 11 for the 100th anniversary of the communist party. Officially the celebration takes place this Thursday but there have been fireworks and shows over the past week. Tonight there was a major performance at the National Stadium in Beijing (aka the Bird’s Nest):

An art performance was held in Beijing on Monday to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Party and state leaders joined about 20,000 people to watch the performance at the National Stadium. #CPC100Years https://t.co/QekliiWjBR pic.twitter.com/W7EJvmiafd

— People's Daily, China (@PDChina) June 29, 2021

As you can see the performance included a lot of fireworks:

Fireworks light up the National Stadium, or Bird's Nest, on Monday during the gala performance to celebrate the centenary of the founding of the #CPC in Beijing. pic.twitter.com/BoJX7GRurp

— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) June 28, 2021

Inside the stadium there was a presentation titled “The Great Journey” which was a multi-media presentation of the party’s history. But Reuters notes that a few significant moments were left out:

A stirring video montage highlights China’s proudest achievements, including its first atomic bomb, the construction of prestige infrastructure and the recent unmanned mission to Mars.

Ignored are the major tumults of the 20th century that historians reckon killed millions: the “Great Leap Forward” famine of 1958-1960, the decade of chaos in the “Cultural Revolution” from 1966 and the crackdown that killed hundreds or even thousands of pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

“There’s a lot of its history (the party) needs to forget,” said Robert Bickers, a historian of the party at Britain’s University of Bristol. “It has devoted a great deal of effort throughout the course of its 100 years ensuring that there is an agreed text of a history that needs to be celebrated.”

It’s not just that these moments get left out of party presentations, it’s that any criticism of the party is heavily censored as part of President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on “historical nihilism.” Earlier this year the party launched a hotline so people could report any such nihilism if they saw it online.

The tip line allows people to report fellow netizens who “distort” the Party’s history, attack its leadership and policies, defame national heroes and “deny the excellence of advanced socialist culture” online, said a notice posted by an arm of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) on Friday.

“Some with ulterior motives … have been spreading historical nihilistic misrepresentations online, maliciously distorting, denigrating and negating the history of the Party,” said the notice.

“We hope that the majority of Internet users will actively play their part in supervising society … and enthusiastically report harmful information,” it said.

This is the sort of thing of which the leftist cancel culture mobs on Twitter can only dream. In China, the government supports your efforts to police the speech of your fellow citizens. No doubt some of those who are accused get a visit from the local police and are maybe asked to sign documents admitting they violated the peace by whatever it was they said about the party or Xi Jinping.

Lots of people in my generation grew up reading 1984 as a warning about the dangers of technocratic totalitarianism. Unfortunately we’re seeing it all really happen in modern China and the world seems to be only slowly waking up to the danger.