Why discuss the Chinese revolution today? At the thirtieth anniversary of China's “reform and opening up” (gaige kaifang) there seems little left to be said about this subject, its significance, legacies, and memories. Like Mao's corpse that lies in state in the Tiananmen mausoleum, China's revolutionary past now seems more dead than ever. As China has risen to become the world's fastest developing economy, the rusty nails of history, progress, and modernization seem long since to have been hammered into its coffin. Lee and Yang's edited volume bucks this trend of forgetting and dehistoricization, both popular and scholarly, that tends to flatten the multilayered historicity of China's revolutionary past to one almost exclusively of violence and human suffering.
Exploring the intersection of memory, politics, and culture in the ongoing social transformations in contemporary China, this volume represents a collective intellectual endeavor by scholars from several disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, history, and literature. The questions it addresses are both important and intriguing. In recent years, many Chinese workers have evoked Maoist symbolism and rhetoric in labor protests; and ordinary urbanites have expressed “nostalgia” for socialist egalitarianism. Why have popular memories of China's revolutionary past emerged as a potent political and cultural force in the alleged “postsocialist” and “postrevolutionary” era? How are collective memories constructed from experience of the past, and shaped by positions in the present? And, how are memories constituted and used by different social and political interests?
This book includes twelve solidly researched and well-written chapters, each exploring the issues relating to memory, politics, and culture from a unique disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological perspective. The essays are divided into two parts. The first group of six case studies examines the political and ideological contexts, meanings, and effects of remembering the past, and how memories are used both by the regime and by different social groups as a powerful critique of the present. The several chapters on peasant memories (Hershatter, Pickowicz, and Manning), for example, unpack the multiple meanings of the Chinese revolution among the rural populations. They illustrate the diversity and flexibility of meanings in both popular memories and state discourses. Gail Hershatter's paper highlights the divergence between official chronology and popular memories. The memories of peasant women she studied are marked by the domestic sphere and its associated material shortages, whereas the official press usually highlights women's contribution to collective labor. In Paul Pickowicz's chapter on a North China village, ordinary peasants use the past for their critique of the present, and they comment on contemporary social and political issues in the broader context of the long history of the Chinese revolution. Examining peasant women's memories of collectivization and the Great Leap Forward, Kimberley Manning explores interesting divergences between official discourse and popular memory. She also discovers multilayered meanings among the latter, as the Great Leap was remembered as a period of complex experience marked not only by hardship, but also by gender equality and liberation for rural women.
Focusing on the post-Great Leap famine in which nearly thirty million people perished, Erik Mueggler's complex yet powerful paper examines the discrepancy between repressed history and popular memories. Mueggler's study of a minority group in Southwestern China portrays how local villagers draw on the memory of traditional symbols and rituals both to make sense of the present and to reconcile with state-imposed violence.
Also emphasizing the ambiguity and heterogeneity of collective memory, Ching Kwan Lee's paper on labor politics in China's rustbelt identifies significant generational differences between workers who joined the workforce in the 1950s and 1960s, and workers who started in the 1970s. Lee argues convincingly that workers' memories do not have a linear relation to contemporary labor protests. While many workers recall the Mao era as a time of relative social equality, they also have graphic memories of material shortage and endemic political violence. An interesting contrast to Lee's study is offered by Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan in their chapter on the moral economy of workers of a state-owned distillery. These workers remembered, as did Lee's rustbelt workers, a sense of commitment to the cause of revolutionary national development. But rather than being nostalgic about the Maoist past, Unger and Chan show that the distillery workers' memories of past sacrifices enabled them to claim rewards in the present. In short, these two chapters demonstrate compellingly that the past often generates ambivalence rather than unequivocal opposition to the state, and that Chinese workers relate to the past differently depending on local socioeconomic circumstances.
The second group of essays is concerned with memories as cultural phenomena and symbolic processes. In a richly textured ethnographic study of a photo exhibit of the Maoist rustication movement, David Davies shows how a private exhibit furnished the site for contentious memories and multiple discourses. Highlighting the importance of the internet as a new medium of communication that has crucially shaped the forms and contents of memory-works, Guobin Yang explores the diverse ways in which China's booming cyberspace has been used to articulate memories and construct historical narratives about the Maoist era. Yang studied a number of websites on the subject of the Cultural Revolution, and identifies a counter-hegemonic discourse in the making that opposes the oversimplified official verdict of the Cultural Revolution as a national disaster characterized solely by violence and political chaos.
Examining Jia Zhangke's famous film Platform as an epic of the Chinese revolutionary experience, Wang Ban's chapter explores the role of genre in structuring historical narratives of twentieth-century China. Wang argues that Platform captures the disintegration of contemporary Chinese society, demonstrating that the film retains traces of China's revolutionary past that may serve as moral resources for the critique of the present. Similarly, through analyzing several Chinese films produced between 1935 and 1999, Robert Chi explores how memories of Chinese nationalism and the Chinese revolution are produced and reproduced through the life history of a revolutionary song, “The March of the Volunteers,” which has also become China's national anthem.
Kirk Denton's fascinating chapter focuses on China's war museums, finding that representations of the War of Resistance against Japan in the Maoist era contrast significantly with those developed in the reform era. While the former stressed heroic revolutionary struggles, the latter highlight the themes of national suffering and victimization. Denton argues that with China's integration into global capitalism, its revolutionary traditions have become increasingly marginalized and even irrelevant in everyday life. The themes of victimization and atrocity therefore become ways in which the state can appropriate the past to forge cohesive national identity, yet without foregrounding the potentially subversive message of popular revolutionary struggle.
Collectively, the essays are cohesive and thematically compelling. By treating not only the politics and social appropriation of memory but also the genre, media, and sites of historical narratives and imageries, these studies capture important dimensions of the role of memory and history in China's ongoing socioeconomic, cultural, and political transformations. By refusing the image of a totalitarian party-state repressing the bourgeoning civil society, the contributors of the book seek to offer a view of memory and history as ambivalent, contradictory, and multilayered. What emerges from all of this is a refreshingly critical perspective on the open-endedness and fluidity of China's postsocialist condition, in which a wide range of political, economic, and cultural possibilities are available for negotiation. This impressive volume is very likely to exert a long-lasting influence on future scholars in the China field.
