Did you glimpse a poster depicting Grigori Voitinsky or maybe Mikhail Borodin in the past weeks when Hong Kong and the rest of China experienced a positive avalanche of commemorative celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of the communist revolution? Indeed, were these names even mentioned?
The answer is no, yet Voitinsky not only arranged financing for the Socialist Youth Corps, the precursor of the Communist Party, but was also instrumental in organising the party's first congress in 1921. Later, Borodin became Sun Yat-sen's political adviser and piloted the delicate negotiations to bring the Communist Party into the Kuomintang and create the conditions for it to become a mass movement. Both men were agents of the Comintern, the Soviet Communist Party's international arm, whose task was to spread revolution throughout the world. The creation of the Chinese Communist Party was widely regarded as one of the Comintern's greatest successes and, right up to the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese party lived very much in the shadow of its big brother across the border.
It might be thought that, given this history, the 60th anniversary celebrations would have offered some acknowledgement to the foreign founding fathers of the People's Republic. But to do so would be to permit an accurate rendering of history and a sullying of what was presented as a triumph of Chinese nationalism in which foreigners played no role.
Clearly, this new version of history, the rewriting of which began as soon as the Communist Party installed itself in power, has been successful and the history of the party has blended into a narrative embracing the history of the nation which suggests that the New China is the only China that really matters.
Even Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, Hong Kong's chief executive, declared that he was celebrating the '60th anniversary of our nation'. It is hard to imagine that he really does not know that the history of the Chinese nation stretches back thousands of years prior to 1949.
While foreigners were excluded from the picture of nation building, China's image-makers were also busy downplaying at best, or ignoring at worst, the real fathers of the nation's communist movement. Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao were the ideologues behind the creation of the Communist Party, and its true founders. Their place in history was quickly usurped by Mao Zedong who is always listed first among the party's founders although he was a minor figure in this process but a major figure in transforming the party into the force that it became.