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How is China governed? It is a question on our minds as the rule of its president Xi Jinping challenges American hopes and stokes our fears. Is it Communist? Capitalist? Confucian? Making sense of Chinese statecraft, or of how any state is governed, requires not only political analysis but also some sense of its history. This is a fundamental historiographical challenge: how can knowledge of past practice inform, deepen, or throw into question what we think we know about later and present practice? This lecture responds to these questions through the example of one mode of Chinese governance—state-sponsored, village-based, public education in civic virtues. This effort to create ideal subjects began with 11th century Confucian bureaucrats, continued in rural education programs in the 1930s, re-emerged with Mao’s ideological campaigns of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and has reappeared today in Xi Jinping’s mandatory political study sessions. In the end, we find that the past does not determine the present, but does shape its choices through inherited conditions (such as administering a nation the size of an empire), political culture, and, most significantly, the parts of historical memory China’s leaders choose to remember or repress.