Washington ( CNN ) -- On this day 100 years ago , troops in the city of Wuchang , in China 's Hubei province , launched a coup against local authorities . The coup ignited a civil war that ended in the collapse of China 's 2,200-year-old imperial system . When a republican government established itself in 1912 , it designated October 10 as the national holiday . Even now , `` Ten-Ten Day '' remains the equivalent of the Fourth of July of the island of Taiwan and for many overseas Chinese communities . On the mainland , however , the Ten-Ten holiday has always been a more ambiguous affair , and so it remains on this centenary . The Los Angeles Times reported : `` The government held low-key celebrations Sunday marking the centennial anniversary of the revolution that ended thousands of years of imperial rule and set the stage for the birth of today 's China . Chinese President Hu Jintao and other dignitaries gathered in Beijing 's Great Hall of the People , under a giant portrait of Sun Yat-sen , the first president of the Republic of China -- the name still carried by modern-day Taiwan . Hu called for the peaceful reunification of China and Taiwan and reiterated his opposition to Taiwanese independence . '' Beyond this political lecture , however , the anniversary was observed in remarkably muted style . A new museum opened in Wuhan . A historical movie was aired on state TV . Some events will be held in the hometown of Sun Yat-Sen , the revolution 's moral leader and the first president of the Chinese republic . But there 's nothing remotely on the scale of the 2010 Shanghai Expo , let alone the 2008 Olympics . And after all , that diffident approach should come as no surprise . Although the present government of China touts its nationalist credentials , it was born in rebellion -- not against imperial overlords , not against colonialist oppressors , not against Japanese invaders , but precisely against the inheritors of the republic established by the events of 1911 : the Kuomintang party created by Sun Yat-Sen . The memory of 1911 is embarrassing in many other ways to the present government . 1911 was a revolution inspired by ideals of democracy and personal liberty . Those ideals are cynically disregarded -- or brutally suppressed -- by China 's present government . 1911 was a revolution in defense of traditional Chinese culture against a foreign dynasty , Manchurians who had ruled in China since 1644 . But who has done more damage to traditional Chinese culture than the regime in place since 1949 ? And not only to the bulldozed monuments of China , but to the country 's inheritance of art and scholarship , reviled and massacred in the Cultural Revolution . A country ruled by people who took power by violence -- and now hold power by repression -- is not a country that dares look honestly at its past . A year ago , I had the opportunity to visit a museum of the Cultural Revolution in Guangdong province , one of only two such in the entire vastness of the country . It was an against-the-odds achievement that the museum could be built at all , but the price of building it was to tell the story in a way that focused almost exclusively on the victimization of some members of the Communist Party by other members . The authors of the museum bought the freedom to tell a portion of the story by suppressing all the rest . As for the other traumas of China 's recent history -- including the terrible self-inflicted famine culminating in mass cannibalism that goes by the mocking name `` the Great Leap Forward '' -- they can only be whispered , if they are discussed at all . The man guilty of those terrible atrocities , Mao Tse-tung , still overlooks Beijing from a giant portrait over Tiananmen Square . So long as the leaders of China trace their power to Mao 's legacy , that long will China be obliged to lie to itself about its history . `` The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting . '' So wrote Milan Kundera about the communist regimes of central Europe . His words apply as aptly to the regime that governs our planet 's most populous nation and most ancient continuing civilization . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Frum .
Monday marks 100th anniversary of revolution against China 's imperial system . David Frum says the Chinese leaders are n't confronting truth of that event . He says China 's regime spurns ideals of democracy and liberty .