Back in Cultural Revolution days, one politically correct tour sometimes laid on for visitors included a trip to the loess caves of Yenan, where the Long March came to an end.
There Communist Party workers showed off the modest cliff-dwelling quarters occupied by Chairman Mao Zedong and his colleagues during some dark days of their war against Japanese invaders and Nationalist pursuers. They understandably called those times the most inspiring in party history.
But an odd thing happened if a visitor asked exactly who lived in the cave right next door to the chairman. Just a secretary, was one stock answer; nobody important. Display a guidebook which said the cave had been home to Liu Shaoqi , later to become president of China, and it would be dismissed curtly.
Foreign propaganda, an official would call the guidebook published a few years earlier by Beijing's own Foreign Language Press.
Presumably, they don't do that in Yenan anymore. Liu has been rehabilitated and the 100th anniversary of his birth has just been celebrated officially and prominently, nearly 30 years after he was hounded to death as the country's leading 'capitalist roader'. Today's verdict calls him 'a great Marxist and proletarian revolutionary who suffered extremely unfair treatment'. One assumes his former Yenan home is no longer called that of an anonymous clerk.
China's leaders deserve full credit for rectifying this piece of their past and calling so much attention to it. Nations usually benefit when they face their history truthfully and abandon dishonest versions invented for the temporary cause of political expediency. This case must have been especially difficult because it raises questions about the role of socialist China's founding father, Chairman Mao, who drove Liu to his death.