The Communist Party of China celebrates its 90th birthday today with all the pomp and ceremony that befits the unchallenged rulers of a rising superpower. But behind all the congratulatory rhetoric over national rejuvenation there is a worrying Chinese view of history and international relations.

In honour of the birthday, museums across the country have prepared exhibitions to explain the party’s “glorious history” to the masses and each one opens in roughly the same way:

“Since British invaders launched the opium war in 1840, the western capitalist powers came one after another to China and China was thus reduced to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society,” reads the introduction to the exhibition at the site in Shanghai of the 1921 founding of the party.