Memory Work: Reconstituting the Ethnic in Post-Mao China

Abstract

If nationalism entails the imagining of a collective historical subject (Anderson 1991; Duara 1994), then post-Mao China has been a conflicted subject,1 where public and private debates have raged over the meanings of the nation. Recent work on post-Mao nationalist discourse has underscored the conflicted nature of this national subject, focusing in particular on the relationship of urban intellectuals (zhishifenzi) to the Chinese state. Wang Jing, for example, has written of the 1980s in China as a period of utopian vision and emergent crises, in which the urban cultural elite (typically associated with the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, various research centers and think tanks, and college campuses and semiofficial journals) maintained a contradictory relationship with Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms and with the notion of Chinese socialism as an alternative to Western liberalism (Wang Jing 1996:2-3; see also Bodman and Wan 1991; Chicago Cultural Studies Group 1992; Nonini 1991; Zhang Xudong 1994). Others have pointed to how the reform-era intellectual elite has pitted itself, a reconstructed, colonized subject, against a despised Communist Party system (Barlow 1991:218). The Cultural Revolution is afforded a privileged position in much of this scholarship,2 portrayed as a misguided political experiment or as a ghostly other haunting the nation with memories of violence, prison, and blood (see, for example, Watson 1994a). And who can forget the tragic events on Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989? Scholars are only now beginning to assess the historical significance of Tiananmen and the deep cultural crisis that has ensued with the post-Tiananmen expansion of a consumer society and the diminished position and influence of the intellectual among the populace (Lu 1996:140). In short, with these traumas