It remains one of the most famous pictures of the past 20 years, an emotive and potent symbol of resistance to oppression; that image of a solitary and unarmed man confronting a line of tanks rolling down Tiananmen Square. Yet for all power of the image it is unknown by many in China; the Tiananmen protests remain a non-event in official government accounts, and it intends on keeping it that way. In conversation over Skype with a friend in China, he told me of how entire sites such as Twitter had been blocked by the government; the better to maintain, on the 20th anniversary of the protests, the widespread ignorance within China of what happened. Such measures are of course typical of repressive states; no autocratic administration relishes the opportunity to remember the rebellions of the past, or publicise those of the present. Though we in the west are all too familiar with the images of that day, within China they are heavily censored, and go unmentioned in school textbooks; history is malleable.

Yet the Chinese treatment of history remains a fascinating one;

. History has always been a contested zone; a central task of any new dynasty was to rewrite the accounts of the past in such a way as to confer legitimacy upon the new rulers. Prior to the fall of the Qing Empire in 1911, a central element to this would be by reference to the Confucian principles laid out in works such as the ‘Spring and Autumn Annals’, or to the moral conclusions drawn by historians such as Sima Guang in the Zizhi Tongjian ( the ‘Comprehensive Mirror to Aid Government’’); thus the alien dynasty of the Manchu Qing could justify their rule of China by making themselves out to be more moral, more Confucian than the Chinese dynasty they had supplanted themselves – it is no coincidence that the name of the dynasty – Qing – means ‘the pure’ or ‘clear’. The concept of the ‘mandate of heaven’, the heavenly right of a dynasty to govern, was one saturated in historical and moral judgments. It was only by reference to the example of the past that a dynasty could be legitimized; command of history, therefore, became all important in pursing the political goals of the present.

Though there are vast and indeed rather screamingly obvious differences between the scholar-officials of China’s ancient past and the seemingly un ideological communist bureaucrats of China’s present, one can still see the many subtle ways in which official presentation of the past serves to have huge ramifications for the present, conferring legitimacy on a communist regime defined above all else by the pursuit of capitalist wealth – and how China’s treatment of its own past is serving to structure its contemporary world position, poisoning Sino-Japanese relations, creating ruptures with Korea, and justifying state activity in Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xingjiang, and against Taiwan. As the economic orthodoxy underpinning China’s rise takes it further and further from that underpinning its Communist political establishment, so have Communist leaders turned to the past in order to legitimize a political position now more than anything else defined by nationalism; the national aggrandizement of China, and the pursuit of prosperity by its citizens.

This is why, despite the apparent resistance of native Tibetans and the rulers of Taiwan, China remains so keen to fully integrate these territories;

. Hence the vitriolic reaction to the Tibetan unrest over last summer; anti-Olympic protests were seen as directly anti-Chinese. Here, once again, history has been a deciding factor; Beijing bases its claim of Tibet as an ‘integral part ‘of China upon its longstanding claim of suzeranity over the region, ignoring the declared independence of Tibet under the 13th Dalai Lama and the de facto independence of the region from 1913 – 1950. Taiwan, too, for all its political independence since 1949 and its earlier period of Japanese rule, finds itself caught under this imperative; by advocating a ‘one China’ policy based in the unitary rule of the distant past, the Communist party can keep political dominance in the present.

This manipulation of the past can perhaps be seen in one issue above all others – in China’s relations with Japan. The Japanese invasions of China from 1931 – 1945, by the staggering death-toll and immense atrocities this resulted in, gives fertile ground for the stirring up of nationalist sentiment. The ‘Three Alls’ policy adopted by the Japanese army in north China – ‘Kill All, Burn All, Loot All’’ amply demonstrates the atrocious nature of their rule. If this did not, the existence of Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army, being specifically devoted to such delights as introducing vivisection, weapons testing, and exposure to chemical and biological weaponry to Chinese prisoners further underlines Japanese brutality. The Rape of Nanjing, a drawn out saga of butchery and murder which resulted in the deaths of anywhere between 200,000 to 400,000 Chinese in the city stands out beyond even these as an example of the manipulation of history for official purposes. Japanese historians and politicians have a long postwar history of vociferously denying the full extent of the atrocities perpetrated in China, minimizing their scale in school text books or even denying them altogether – and, as Iris Chang notes in her book ‘’The Rape of Nanjing’’, the Chinese government was for a long time content to quietly ignore these epic historical outrages: both the Sino-Soviet split and the beginning of China’s drive toward greater economic liberalization and international trade meant Chinese authorities perhaps saw little need to reopen the scabbed wounds of the past.

Not so today; Japanese treatment of history has provided Chinese with wide scope for the more contemporary manipulation of popular patriotism. Denouncing Japanese historical revisionism and the insensitivity of a political culture that can still allow its politicians to visit the Yasukuni shrine – spiritual home to Japan’s war dead, convicted war criminals among them – provides fertile ground for the Communist party to refashion its image and popular basis for legitimacy from the provision of Communist revolution to the protector of a strong, unified China.

Thus we return to the central theme; the manipulation of history for nationalist purposes. Not only are certain events non-events – Tiananmen Square for example – but entire historical and cultural narratives find themselves subsumed into the great unitary whole; nations become non-nations in the hands of an intelligent centralized power, and even concessions to internal national difference can be made to subtly underline the state narrative. Take for instance the historiographical fate of a Uighur princess called the ‘Fragrant Concubine’ in Chinese legend, Iparhan to contemporary Uyghurs. To the former, she represents the flowering of a greater Chinese unity, the love between her and the Qianglong Emperor a potent symbol for the greater nation and the deep historical bonds between Han Chinese and the Turkic Uighurs of Xingjiang province. For the latter, ‘Iparhan’ seems a less comely figure; a wife to anti- Qing rebel forced into concubinage at the imperial court, killed by the Empress Dowager as she plots to avenge her conquered homeland by murdering the Emperor. One imagines today’s rioting Uyghurs remain unconvinced by the former account.

The diverse topics and issues of Tibet, the Uighur minority, Sino-Japanese enmity, the occasional flare-ups over Taiwan, and even Tiananmen square are all united – but not by so crude a force as the mere intransigence of an authoritarian regime. Though some pundits might suggest otherwise, these activities stem do not stem from a dastardly love of repression on the part of an iron and faceless party bureaucracy; it comes as a creative government response to the problems of rule in a an unideological age.

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As Fu Ying, Chinese Ambassador to Britain, recently wrote on the Guardian's 'Comment is Free':

''Throughout the centuries, China has been a multi-ethnic society connected by a commitment to unity, prosperity and harmony. Unity is deep in the blood. That is where our strength lies, and forms the basis for China's interaction with the international community.''

The message, perhaps? That strength and national progress lies in obedience to the central government and central historiography. Han migration into Xingjiang and Tibet, so resented by the idigenous Uighur and Tibetan minorites, is a sign merely ''of China's development and progress''. The uncomfortable counternarrative - that of a swamped local nationalisms, cultural rebellions, and violent reactions ranging from the Tibetan rebellion of 1959 to the Uighur riots in Urumqi - is lost in the greater narrative of Chinese historial development. Those killed in 1989 and those rioting today are both disdained as the product of hostile foreign interference; again helping to fashion a wider story of Chinese unity - us against them.