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Katie Stallard was a foreign correspondent for the U.K.’s Sky News in both Russia and China, from where she also reported on North and South Korea, traveling to Pyongyang and the DMZ in the course of her work. She has drawn on those experiences to write Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea, a book which looks at the ways in which authoritarian leaders in each of those countries have used history to buttress their regimes. Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times included it as one of the best books on politics in 2022. Now based in the U.S., she is a senior editor at the New Statesman, where she writes about China and global affairs.

Q: Your new book, Dancing on Bones, looks at the ways in which post-World War Two regimes in China, Russia and North Korea have used history to bolster their power. Could you explain the main themes of the book?

A: This book came out of my reporting in all three countries; and out of the sense that looking at these three regimes from the outside, there can be a tendency to see the leaders as Bond villain-esque, that there are these three strongman-style leaders ruling — as in the case of Putin — at the end of their very long tables, giving orders, pulling a lever and then their will is carried out. And my experience was that actually it was much more complicated than that. I felt that we were overlooking the efforts that these regimes were making to advance a compelling narrative for domestic consumption as to why they needed to be in power, and — in all three cases — why they needed to build up their military strength. 

The initial idea for the book came from covering the early part of the war in Ukraine in 2014, and hearing, on the pro-Russian side of the lines and in Russia itself, how frequently World War Two, or what is known there as the Great Patriotic War, would be invoked to explain what was happening. So I wanted to look at how the history of these past wars has become so dominant in the present politics of these three countries, and how it serves those in power in terms of their own regime’s security.

Repression, coercion, corruption are absolutely very important tools of how these three regimes stay in power. But they also put considerable effort into what China calls ideological work, and to instill this narrative that takes in the history of these past wars, and leads to their preferred conclusions about why the current regime, therefore, must be in power. This is separate from commemoration, or just saying that we should remember what happened in these past wars, I see this more as manipulation, exploitation, and a very selective remembering of what happened. 

The title Dancing on Bones comes from a quote from a Russian journalist who tried to start his own commemorative movement, who felt that the history of these past wars was being exploited and turned into something bombastic and militaristic. His term for how Putin’s regime was treating the memory of the Great Patriotic War was that they were ‘dancing on bones’, that they were using, quite cynically, the memory of those who actually fought and died in these wars to serve their current political purposes.

What common themes did you find across all three countries?

It’s important to be really clear that these are very different political systems, and are arguably much more different than they are similar. What struck me about the use of history in all three was firstly, how central these past wars were in the contemporary narrative. But secondly, the parallels in terms of focusing on a period of great past suffering and national peril. So in all three cases, looking at times when the country had been invaded, and when its citizens had genuinely suffered terribly, in a manner that is often missing from more Western-oriented histories of these conflicts; and how they tell a tale of how the countries were able to fight back against foreign enemies by uniting behind a strong leader, by making great collective sacrifices and by regaining their national strength and their military capabilities, to be able to reclaim their sovereignty and repel these foreign invasions. 

It’s almost a sort of morality tale, in all three cases, of how the country suffered and was preyed upon in the past when there was weakness, and how it was able to reclaim its freedom and protect its citizens by uniting behind these strong leaders. And what is common in all three cases is the extent to which that is called upon in framing contemporary threats to the country — this idea that, once again, these countries are beset by these extraordinary, and in some cases, existential foreign threats, and why therefore they need to rally behind the political leadership; they need to build up their military strength, and they need to fight back as their ancestors have done in the past.

Focusing on China: Can you talk about how the way that the Communist Party has talked about the war has shifted over time?

One of the things that was really striking to me was the extent to which these stories have changed over time. Looking at the present day manifestation, it’s easy to imagine it has always been like this, that since 1945, this is the way commemoration has been: But it really has gone through dramatic shifts. And in the Chinese case, it really was not until after Mao’s death, and after Chiang Kai Shek’s death, that the Nationalists were brought back into the PRC’s narrative of the war. 

During Mao’s rule, the focus was more on the great victories that were said to have been delivered under his rule. He didn’t see a reason to give credit to Chiang Kai Shek and the KMT, who were presumed to be gathering their strength on Taiwan and preparing an attack on the mainland. So crediting the KMT for their role in the war would really only play into Chiang’s hands, and potentially appeal to sympathizers on the mainland. There were still grassroots commemorations, and the war was still invoked on the major anniversaries. But right after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, you see some of the war memorials that had just gone up a few years earlier being reappropriated into national liberation monuments. So there’s a shift to move on from the war to focus on the liberation story. 

These individual KMT stories have been brought back into the broader national story of the war, as it has suited the priorities of the CCP.

It’s really in the early 1980s, post-Mao, that you start to see the KMT brought back into the story. And in particular in 1985, when an exhibit about the war for the first time talks about an all-nation war of resistance; you start to see as part of that exhibition displays about KMT generals, KMT battles. Following on from that, books are published with much more of a focus on the KMT, and therefore also much more of a focus on some of the worst Japanese atrocities during the war: for instance, the Nanjing Massacre, which previously had been really complicated to talk about, because it was in an area under KMT control. But once it became more of a nationwide war of resistance, and it was really explained as a people’s war, then you could talk about much more of the war experience. 

That shift really started in 1985, which also plays into talking more about the American role. It’s at a time when China is opening up, it’s developing its relations with the United States. And it’s useful to be able to call up memories of how ‘we, the Chinese’ fought on the same side during the war. Speaking to people who took part in congressional delegations to China during that period, they talk about how they would be taken to see the airfields where the American soldiers were stationed. 

One person I interviewed for the book was a lady whose grandfather had fought and died on the KMT side during the war; [the family] had really suffered during the first few decades of PRC rule, because they were associated with the KMT. They had been deemed “counter revolutionary” during the Cultural Revolution. And she had basically been told as a child not to talk about her grandfather, and what he did during the war, because that would only get the family in trouble. But in the mid-1980s, he was rehabilitated, so they could at least talk about his past again, and as the profile of the war has been elevated over the last couple of decades, particularly under Xi Jinping, he’s now been given a status as a war hero. There’s a monument at the site where he died. These individual KMT stories have been brought back into the broader national story of the war, as it has suited the priorities of the CCP.

Hasn’t it also been the case that China government has been reinterpreting the war in a way that bolsters its image as one of the nations that was a founder of the postwar global order?

Yes, something that you hear Chinese diplomats frequently reference is the fact that China was one of the first to sign the UN Charter after the War, glossing over the fact that it was the Republic of China rather than the PRC at the time. This is something you see common to both the Chinese and the Russian story, the idea that ‘we’ are the founders of the post-war order, ‘we’ are the guardians of that order, and ‘we’ have legitimacy and can claim the moral high ground, because we are also the people who defeated Nazism and fascism during the Second World War. And we should be accorded respect appropriately. 

There is a subtle one upmanship between the Chinese and the Russian narratives. One of the ways that Xi Jinping has talked about this, for instance during the Victory Day commemorations in 2015, was about how China fought first and for the longest. He talked about Chinese casualties, saying there were 35 million casualties in China (including both dead and wounded), and 26 million in the Soviet Union (the current estimate for the number of dead). So their narratives of the war complement each other, but there has been a push under Xi to elevate China’s role amongst the Allied nations, to say China was the one that was the first, that fought for the longest, and played a critical role in defeating fascism — and therefore China’s contribution to that victory should be remembered, and the Chinese people’s suffering and sacrifice should be a central part of this story in a way that it that it hasn’t always been. Growing up in the U.K., I remember learning almost nothing about the Chinese involvement in World War Two, our version of that history was focused very much on the Western Front and the D-Day landings. So it’s a way to say we’ve fought first and for the longest and our contribution to this war should be remembered.

… I think Xi sees history as a key factor in that it can’t be allowed to slip from the party’s grasp, it can’t become a stick to beat the party with, and is something that needs to be brought under tight control. 

Another aspect is that World War Two fits into the narrative of victimization, which in China’s case goes back to the 19th century with the Opium Wars, and the other humiliations that China would say that it suffered during that period. Is that right?

Yes, this predates the PRC, you see quite a focus on national humiliation during the Republican era. Chiang Kai Shek had a practice, for I think 20 years, of starting his day by vowing in his diary to wipe out humiliation and listing the ways that he’s going to do that. So the idea that China has suffered this past great humiliation goes back to much earlier in the century: but it fades from view while Mao is alive and in power, and really starts to come back in force, post Tiananmen. 

You see in Deng Xiaoping’s address to senior officers, five days after the Tiananmen crackdown, he identifies that the Party’s greatest mistake was in ideological education. He talks about how they hadn’t done enough to educate people about what China was like in the old days and what kind of country it was to become. During the early 1990s there was a concerted shift to focus on China’s past victimization, its past humiliation, rather than the more triumphalist narrative that had been the case during Mao’s time. The unofficial slogan of that campaign is ‘Never forget national humiliation’. You see the literature on national humiliation really surges and there is a renewed focus on how the country suffered in the past, beginning in the Opium Wars, with the Second World War representing what they describe as the final act of the century of humiliation. 

The narrative then is that it is only with the CCP rallying the nation to fight back, and the founding of the PRC, that the country was finally able to put an end to the century of humiliation and build the new country that we see today and recover its national strength. 

What sort of gloss has Xi put on all of this, and what sort of message is he trying to convey, do you think?

He sees history as a really important tool. He’s personally very interested in it; he seems to have gone to great lengths to read and to educate himself about it. But he also sees history as something which, if it’s allowed to slip out of control, can become a real threat to the Party. So you see that within a month of becoming general secretary in 2012, he gives a closed door speech where he reflects on the causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and one of the factors that he sees as really critical is the loss of ideological control and what he calls historical nihilism. It’s something he repeats in a couple of speeches soon after coming to power. And it then features very heavily in Document No. 9, the secret document that was subsequently leaked in the spring of the next year, identifying the need for a serious struggle in the ideological sphere and historical nihilism as a trend that needs to be combated — essentially attacks on the party’s version of history that need to be put an end to. 

I see it as very similar to the verdict that Deng gives post Tiananmen, of needing to really get a firm grip on ideological work and to prioritize ideological education. Xi sees history as a key factor in that it can’t be allowed to slip from the party’s grasp, it can’t become a stick to beat the party with, and is something that needs to be brought under tight control. 

As well as an effort to seal off challenges to the official narrative, he urged greater efforts to elevate the profile of the Second World War. Xi calls early on for more scholarship of the history of the war, and for scholars to look again at the question of whether it should actually be described as a 14-year war of resistance. Prior to 2017, the war was conventionally referred to as the eight year war of resistance beginning in 1937, with a separate, but connected regional war in the northeast, beginning in 1931. And Xi really opens the way to have the start date of the war pushed back to 1931, which there is a credible historical case to support, but also includes much more of a period when the Communist Party was actively fighting in the Northeast — rather than once you get into the nationwide war from 1937, when it’s primarily the KMT that’s doing most of the fighting and the dying.

… the debate around history had become very complicated, to the point where some of the people I spoke to didn’t want me to use their names. I’m not sure if I could even have the conversations now…

One thing that I heard consistently, talking to scholars and historians in Beijing, was that before Xi they had always had to be very careful with how they talked about particularly contentious areas of history, but that some debate was possible. Whereas under Xi Jinping, they felt that the space for that debate was really being closed right down, and history was being treated as an issue where you’re either patriotic — and therefore on the CCP side and understood this supposedly vital role the CCP was playing in saving and strengthening the country — or you’re a traitor. You’re someone who’s anti China, who’s probably funded by foreign forces. So the debate around history had become very complicated, to the point where some of the people I spoke to didn’t want me to use their names. I’m not sure if I could even have the conversations now, I’m not sure if some of those people would even agree to be interviewed these days.

Katie Stallard being held back outside Pu Zhiqiang’s trial, held in Beijing, December 13, 2015. Pu Zhiqiang is a Chinese civil rights lawyer, and on December 22, 2015, he received a three year suspended sentence. Photos provided by Katie Stallard.

There’s an image you use towards the end of the book to illustrate this of an anaconda in a chandelier…

Yes, this is from Perry Link’s brilliant essay: it was something that several people raised with me as a good way to understand how to think about writing about history: that it’s not the case that you necessarily know where the firm limits are, but you understand that there’s an anaconda in the chandelier above you, as Link puts it, whose constant silent message is: you yourself decide [where the line is], and in the shadow of the great snake, you make your own adjustments accordingly. I think since Xi has come to power, the presence of that anaconda has become much clearer. And so it is a much braver and a much bolder thing to do to push the limits of historical debate. It’s a much safer thing to do, particularly if you don’t want to get into trouble, and if you want to be able to publish and to be able to teach, to make sure that you are staying within the bounds of acceptable debate. 

One professor I talked to, for instance, said that there have long been cameras in the classrooms in which he has taught, but he had previously felt that he wasn’t necessarily being monitored too closely and he felt like he could probably get away with talking about certain things. Whereas over the past decade, he’s become much more careful and much more wary of the cameras in the classrooms, because there are cases of students reporting their professors and people getting into real trouble for comments they make in the classroom. So I think that the anaconda is there and is much more high tech.

What’s your sense of how ordinary people see all of this? 

One of the things that I reflected a lot upon, writing the book primarily in the United States at a time when history was a very live political issue here, was that to some extent, there are parallels, particularly with regard to the idea you hear from some politicians that it is “unpatriotic” to focus on the shameful aspects of the country’s past. As in all countries, a portion of the population does genuinely buy into these narratives. You don’t need the CCP to censor debate, to be able to isolate yourself from alternative sources of information and to put yourself in an information bubble. 

But it would be a mistake to assume that everybody who is immersed in these propagandistic narratives, and who is required to learn the Communist Party’s version of history to pass their high school exams, necessarily believes it. I saw it more as a way to dominate the discourse, and to make it very difficult to understand what other people really believe. For some people, there will absolutely be true belief, as there is in other countries. But for everybody else, it’s more about policing the boundaries of what you can say in public, and making it so that cadres at local levels or diplomats representing China on the world stage need to use this language, and frame their statements with this version of history, so it becomes dominant in the official discourse. 

How does the Chinese leadership talk about some of the more shameful aspects of the last 70 years of communist rule?

I would say with the bare minimum. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are there: if you look at the 2021 historical resolution, for instance, they are in there. They’re described as mistakes, but they’re really given a quite glancing treatment, certainly not comparable to the scale and the severity of these episodes in real life. 

Tiananmen has really been reduced, certainly in high school history textbooks, and in the popular discourse to a period of counter-revolutionary turmoil, where it was important for the party to take a firm stance and to deal resolutely with what’s portrayed as a threat to the party’s rule; and that it was a necessary and correct response. I think one of the real sadnesses in recent years is that there used to be an alternative narrative preserved in Hong Kong: people from the mainland could go to Hong Kong, could visit the June Fourth Museum and could learn for themselves what had actually happened or could attend the annual vigils: but that has really been shut down since 2020: the vigils have not been able to be held, the pillar of shame monument has has been dismantled and taken away. And the June Fourth Museum has been raided by the police and shut down, and is now planning to operate online and in the United States. That’s great for people who can access it, but that really removes an important source of alternative information for people within Greater China and I’m sure it is not a coincidence. 

So it’s becoming increasingly hard to discover an alternative version to the Communist Party’s narrative of what actually happened; and of course history education was a really foundational issue in the protest movement in Hong Kong over the last decades. I think that the fight to be allowed to remember and to study alternative versions of history has been a really important part of what has been happening there. But unfortunately, it really does feel like a one way ratchet, where control of history is only closing down and it’s becoming much harder to discover the real facts and to conduct independent research.

One of the things that always strikes me about China’s leaders is that so many of them lived through and suffered during much of this history. And yet, they seem so prepared to gloss over or put aside those experiences in some way, or at least not to challenge the party, or the party’s rule. 

I see it as almost that they’ve learned different lessons from those periods. And I think in terms of Xi’s experiences, and looking at his family’s terrible suffering during the Cultural Revolution, it seems that the answer he has come out to as a result of that is the need for control, order and stability. So it’s not necessarily that the party is wrong, it’s that the mechanism was wrong. The stirring up of grassroots sentiment and the setting loose of these powerful urges, and the violence that followed, was the mistake, not the party itself. So I see him as resolving to make sure that that can’t happen again, that grassroots movements can’t get out of control, that the party’s central control is dominant. And that order and stability matter, above all, even growth, even above economic development it would seem.

What conclusions did you come to, if any, about how we should respond to this from outside of China? 

I think one of the things, and it’s the case with Russia too, is to not buy into the idea that the CCP’s version of history is the only acceptable version of Chinese history, and to do what we can to support independent scholarship. And to preserve it, for instance in the Russian case, for all of the independent journalists who’ve had to flee from Russia, and are now operating in exile in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, making it as easy as possible to continue those activities. 

There has been a tendency politically here in the U.S., and in Europe now with Russia, to see Chinese students, Chinese citizens, Russian citizens as a threat to our own national security and to talk about blanket bans, or blanket visa bans. That’s the opposite of what we should be doing. We should be recognizing how difficult it is now to conduct this scholarship within these countries, and critical journalism within these countries, and trying to make it easier, and do everything we can to encourage brilliant Chinese and Russian historians to do their research in U.S. and U.K. institutions — to bring their sources and all of their resources with them and to conduct that scholarship abroad.

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