Abstract
Ideological and practical concerns inform the shaping of collective memory in present historical labours, but the legacy of narratives inherited from earlier generations also produce certain restrictions on how history may be envisioned and transmitted in the present. In this article I trace the labour of historical forgetting, invention and remembrance performed in modern China by the May Fourth Movement and the Chinese Communist Party, addressing how this legacy affects currently held views of past, present and future. I argue that China is today witnessing a remarkable and problematic shift in its appraisal of history and tradition, as its guiding trope of history, historical materialism, is undergoing crisis while challenged by a competing vision of a Chinese cultural renaissance.
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