CHINA'S chief censors gathered at the conference room of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television several weeks ago to address the Government's leading propaganda concerns. Top of the list: getting history right.

China's communists are relaxed about letting go much of the economy, about the 137 million people with access to the internet, about letting people travel widely. But the Soviet experience has taught them that losing control of the past would be the step too far.

The officials who gathered at SARFT were urged to "watch the erroneous trend of denying the historic achievements of the party and comrade Mao Zedong". It was crucial, said the leading speakers, "to create the correct atmosphere for the 17th Communist Party congress, to promote the main melody", steadying the ship for the five-yearly meeting in October that will decide the next generation of national leaders. Publishers were severely criticised for letting writers "run the red light", getting too close to taboo topics.

China's history war started boiling over last year with the sacking of the editor and deputy of Bing Dian (Freezing Point), one of the country's most influential weekly publications, a section of China Youth Daily. This was the sign that the party had decided that, although it had conceded most of the economy to market forces, it was going to tighten its grip on the country's cultural life, especially on its history.

Yuan Weishi, a courtly 75-year-old professor, is one of the vital voices of the new China. It was his article about the bloody Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when the cult-like Boxers killed tens of thousands of Westerners and Chinese Christians, that forged a crucial battleground in the war.

He says: "The Communist Party's propaganda department views the rebellion as a revolutionary action, but I think it was not. They think it was a contribution to social evolution, I think it was a crime."

In his late teens, Yuan joined a secret student organisation set up by the Communist Party, then became a full party member in 1950, the year after it took power in China. He remains a member.

In a trendy coffee shop overlooking a garden next to the Zhong Shan (Sun Yat-sen) University campus in Guangzhou, he turns off his tiny new mobile phone and says with typical understatement: "Things changed after the Cultural Revolution. It was a disaster for China and it made me think of its historical origins."

He is busy writing and reworking books, a half-dozen of which were published or reprinted in 2006. That's understandable because he has been doing a lot of rethinking. China had two significant streams of history during its chaotic 20th century, he says: the Marxist school and the more pragmatic outlook of Jiang Ting-fu, who was a Kuomintang or Nationalist diplomat "who built the foundations of Chinese foreign relations".

Yuan says that he observed the impact of Mao from both viewpoints and through "my own study of the historical facts". He recalls vividly a seminar held in May 1979, soon after the Cultural Revolution ended, when senior cadre Deng Li-chun told the story of a woman in Liaoning province who was killed because of her vocal opposition to the anarchy.

"First they slit her throat so she could not speak, then they shot her," he says. "Deng asked, 'Why such cruelty? Because we were raised on the milk of wolves.'

"The class struggle was taken to extremes and nationalism was taken to extremes, and these two damaged the Chinese people severely."

But thinking has evolved rapidly in the past few years. "At universities, as a new generation of teachers is emerging, fewer and fewer people in the history departments now believe what was taught before."

When his essay on the Boxer Rebellion was published, "I was surprised at the response from the official mouthpiece. They don't want to give you any room to dismantle their system of interpreting history because they think the Communist Party is the heir of the revolution."

According to the version created by official historian Hu Sheng, he says, the late 19th century and early 20th century saw three revolutionary climaxes: the Boxers, the Taiping Rebellion led by Hong Xiuquan, who viewed himself as Jesus Christ's younger brother, and the 1911 rebellion led by Zhong that overthrew the Qing dynasty. "Hu claimed the Communist Party is the inheritor of all three, so it is very hard to criticise any of them," Yuan says.

Official China remains intolerant of diverse histories. "China is still in transition," Yuan says. "From one perspective, it's quite open economically and in social life, but in apparent compensation the ideological controls keep tightening."

There are "many trigger points that make the propaganda people upset", he says. "The official evaluation of Mao as 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong makes it very hard for historians" to rethink not only Mao, but also other emblematic figures or events in modern China.

The professor says: "This is too simplified a formula to describe any historical figure, especially one like him, who played such a big role."

Today, he says, many people support the party "because of China's opening up and reform, and the improved life of the people. Its defenders think its continued monopoly rule is gloriously bestowed by history. They keep promoting their view that history has chosen the Communist Party. So they must maintain a tight grasp on the interpretation of history."

Lei Yi, a professor at the contemporary history research centre of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says the party has always paid great attention to the ideology surrounding the process by which it took power, as a crucial element of its legitimacy.

The party's two linchpins during this period were that it was anti-feudalism and anti-imperialism. Because the Boxers were viewed as anti-imperialist, they were co-opted into this story. Lei says that founders of the party noted negative aspects of the Boxers, but "gradually their image became positive, reaching its peak during the Cultural Revolution", when many Red Guard groups began naming themselves after the Boxers.

Most historians, however, retained a grip on reality, he says, and after the Cultural Revolution, "little by little, articles and discussions extended this freedom. But this is restricted to academic study, not to popular publications or to the media. Even now there remains a big gap" between the thinking and discussion tolerated on campuses and in the wider Chinese society. "We can openly discuss economic theory in public today, but not history."

The appeal to nationalism is constantly strengthening, he says, and helps to explain the fever for emperors, reflected in an outpouring of television series, films and books.

Historian Xia Chun-tao, 43, vice-director of CASS's Deng Xiaoping Thought Research Centre, one of China's core ideological think tanks, says: "It's very natural for historians to have different views on events. But there is only one correct and accurate interpretation, and only one explanation that is closest to the truth. Professor Yuan's article represents only his personal opinion or maybe that of a small group of academics. The majority will disagree."

He says this mainstream views the Boxers "as an anti-imperialist and patriotic movement, and as an uprising of the peasants. They wanted to uproot Christianity totally from Chinese soil, as well as all goods and commodities from Westerners."

Xia says the historical background was that China faced "being split apart by the colonialists. It was facing unprecedented danger."

The resulting methods of protests included killing Westerners and burning Western objects, he concedes. But because Yuan's critique of the Boxers represents only himself or a few other people, "there's not much value to have a big debate".

And some issues, he says, are "quite clearly defined" and thus not susceptible to debate. "There is a pool of clear water and there's no need to stir up this water. Doing so can only cause disturbance in people's minds, for example, by only seeing the backwardness of the Boxers."

But despite such academic critiques and "however much time passes, the party's general judgment" on such key events won't change.

This is especially the case with "contemporary history", the period from 1840 to 1949 when the Communist Party's rule began. During this period, anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism were preconditions for national development, he says.

"We are talking here of a Marxist explanation of history. There have been a few academics who tried to interpret history from a very different perspective, but their conclusions are not convincing," Xia says.

There is also, for instance, "a fixed definition of assessment of Mao. In the early 1980s, the party developed an authoritative, scientific document on his achievements and flaws. No matter how many years pass, I don't think this definition will change.

"In his later years he made some mistakes, but they were the mistakes of a great proletarian leader. Neither party nor people will ever forget the glorious achievements of Mao."

Some cadres (party officials), says Xia, seemed to want to stress Mao's mistakes too much. "But Deng Xiaoping said we can't throw dirt on Mao's image because to do so would also dirty the party's image. We think history is our treasure and history stresses the need for domestic stability. Because of our stability, this has become the golden era for China in the past 150 years. The need for academics to have a strong sense of responsibility means a strong sense of the need for such stability, and not providing absurd opinions that disturb people's minds."

Xia has been heavily involved in the run of recent TV costume dramas in China. Typically, he says, he was invited to a reading of a new play about a top mandarin in the Qing dynasty and to review the script of a TV drama about the Taiping Rebellion. He says: "Several times I have had to speak up frankly to China Central TV to point out where they have violated historical truth."

Falling further back into history, emperors can be divided into two clear categories, he says. Good emperors are deemed to have worked to unify China and, even if their reigns were bloody, they were justified. Bad emperors tolerated or failed to prevent division.

Yu Jie, one of China's leading dissident intellectuals, has been a highly popular author -- his 16 books each selling more than 100,000 and the first, Fire and Ice, almost one million -- and has a masters degree in contemporary Chinese literary and philosophical history.

But he has become so outspoken and has won so much attention within China that he is unlikely to obtain a job from a Chinese institution or again be published within China. He is unequivocal about Mao, uninterested in whether he was 25 per cent or 35per cent good or bad. "He was the worst tyrant in China's history; in world history, actually," Yu says. "Worse than Hitler or Stalin. Under his rule, millions of Chinese people died, far more than in the anti-Japanese war. The pity is the interpretation of history is in the hands of the Communist Party and ordinary people don't know about him.

"For instance, last year I was attending a seminar at the University of Technology in Sydney, and walked into a Hunan restaurant and saw Mao's portrait hanging on the wall.

"Westerners don't think that's strange, but if it was Hitler or Mussolini it would arouse criticism, people would get upset. I didn't say anything to the owner at the time, but said in a lecture to the Chinese community in Sydney that I thought it was wrong."

Because "there is no real religion in China", he says, "one of the functions of history is to construct a religion and official historians play the role of bishops in the West". Mao, he says, described the party's rule as based "on the gun and the pen, thus on force and a lie. And one of the important foundations of the empire of lies in China is the distortion of history, interpreted by Marxist thinking."

He says the party has benefited the country by liberalising the economy but wants to maintain its own economic privileges by halting the liberalisation there, short of the world of ideas and history. "If the truth of historical events were revealed to the Chinese people, it might trigger a domino effect."

There was greater freedom in China in the 1920s, Yu says. "There was a lot of independent publishing and private universities, and if people were censored they could escape to the treaty ports, which together with the missionaries sped up the modernisation of China." He says that while he sees many academics broken by the system, they are not being sent to labour camps any more.

But this does not indicate a greater tolerance. "In recent years academic freedom has grown more restricted and the situation has worsened. But people are not totally isolated, as long as their articles can be published in Hong Kong or Taiwan."

He says the costume dramas that have flourished during the past decade "redefine historical tyrants as heroes, praising such golden times, especially if the emperor extended the country's borders, for peak-hour viewing. Under this propaganda, unity is the ultimate value and strength is to be applauded regardless of the effect on people's lives. This has a strong flavour of fascism.

"And this poisonous propaganda will gradually, day by day, penetrate the judgments of ordinary people."

Yu has many friends who are moving, in their early 30s, into positions of power in party, government or campus. "A lot of them laugh at me today, saying I'm a naive Quixote tilting at windmills. But I think I'm happier. I don't have to look up at the face of any superior."

The secret police invited him for a meal some while ago and suggested politely that he'd be better off moving to the US. But he stays in China, living with his wife in a small flat in a new estate on the eastern edge of Beijing. "I've had many offers of work as a visiting scholar overseas, but I don't want to live outside China because I am a commentator on China and if I move I will lose contact, will lose my sense of things here."

He says that he and other young intellectuals have become Christians, "forming a small family", and that this religious belief "is embedded in my thinking and in my relationships, and that belief helps me to remove a sense of fear".

Yu, whose father is a party member, says: "In the long run, I'm optimistic. Democratic society is a must for China. But it will take a long time, maybe 20 years. The economic reforms have made China more vigorous and communism more vigorous and long-lasting. The party has billions of dollars in its pockets."

And, China's free-thinking historians complain, it has the country's colourful but often cruel past in those pockets too.