For Asia Society’s Orville Schell, the question exemplifies a Western paradigm which might not necessarily apply in China. Schell suggests it is borne out of the Freudian notion that the individual and the society must be introspective, life must be continually examined and that remembering the past helps us to understand our psychological formation and only by doing so do we remain humane and functional.
Nevertheless, admits Schell:
Such may sound like an indelibly Western notion steeped irrevocably in Judeo-Christian kultur with little relevance to Eastern cultures. But, in this day and age, you do not have to a follower of Sigmund Freud to believe that a healthy person, like a healthy society, almost inevitably needs to come to terms with who, or what, it is. To do that effectively, the always-painful process of engaging the gears of historical memory is almost inevitable. For the Chinese Communist Party to imagine that it alone might somehow be exempt from this ineluctable verity would seem arrogant folly.
via How Would Facing Its Past Change China’s Future? – China Digital Times (CDT).