This article interrogates the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) evolving struggle over the past by tracing the career of the concept of historical nihilism (历史虚无主义), from polemic to a fully institutionalized yet diffuse political technology under Xi Jinping. Through close analysis of historical documents, Party resolutions, laws, disciplinary codes, court rulings, propaganda circulars, and digital governance directives, it identifies two phases: a pre-2013 rhetorical stage, during which the term remained discursively unstable and primarily served to stigmatize heterodox scholarship, and a post-2013 institutional stage, in which it was recast as an existential threat and embedded across four domains of Party-state power: law, discipline, education, and cyberspace. To account for this transformation, the article draws on Althusser’s concept of interpellation, along with Bourdieu and Butler’s insights on performative authority, to show how historical nihilism evolved from a polemical label into a political technology capable of triggering juridical, bureaucratic, and algorithmic sanctions. This shift exemplifies the CCP’s transition from narrating history to governing its possibility, and from rhetorical contestation to epistemic sovereignty: the sovereign power to determine what history is, who may speak it, and how it must be remembered.
Jean Christopher Mittelstaedt (Tue,) studied this question.