A senior Chinese official made a threat to historians aiming to study the country’s early COVID-19 response, advising them not to take “the wrong side,” the Financial Times reported.
According to the paper, the comments came at a closed-door event at which education official Wang Binglin went through topics that were likely to be marked classified and banned from study.
More than 100 government figures and scholars were there, the FT said.
Wang firstly warned historians against “playing up” the country’s historical Land Reform Movement, during which millions of landlords were killed and property redistributed under Mao Zedong’s rule, the FT reported.