Time for China to abandon its victim mentality

IN November 2012, two weeks after becoming leader of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping visited the National Museum in Tiananmen Square. There, after viewing a grand exhibition called The Road to Revival, which recalls China's century of humiliation beginning with the Opium War of 1840, Mr Xi issued a call for achieving the Chinese Dream, or "the great revival of the Chinese nation".

History was on the Chinese leadership's mind again last year. The National People's Congress, China's parliament, decreed that, henceforth, the 1945 victory over Japan would be celebrated every Sept 30 and the 1937 Nanjing Massacre would be remembered every Dec 13.

China's political use of history is of long standing. After the party's near-death experience in the Tiananmen Uprising of 1989, it made a key policy decision to use "patriotic education" to nurture students loyal to the party who would not be swayed by Western values of democracy and human rights. That meant emphasis on the evils of imperialism and, in particular, on Japanese aggression.