Popular Memories of the Mao Era

Abstract

Over the past 10 or 15 years in China, there has been unprecedented critical public discussion of key episodes in PRC history, in particular the Great Famine of 1959-1961, the Anti-Rightist movement of 1957, and the Cultural Revolution, with the wave of Red Guard apologies. These discussions are quite different from previous expressions of traumatic or nostalgic memories of the Mao era, respectively in the 1980s and 1990s. They reflect both growing dissatisfaction with the authoritarian control over history exercised by the Chinese state, and the new spaces provided for counter-hegemonic narratives by social media and the growing private economy in the 2000s. Unofficial or independent journals, self-published books, social media groups, independent documentary films, private museums, oral history projects, and archival research by amateur historians have all contributed to embryonic public or semi-public discussion. The present volume provides an overview of these new forms of popular memory, in particular critical memory, of the Mao era. Focusing on the processes of private production, public dissemination, and social sanctioning of narratives of the past in contemporary China, it examines the relation between popular memories and their social construction as historical knowledge. The three parts of the book are devoted to the shifting boundary between private and public in the press and media, the reconfiguration of elite and popular discourses in cultural productions (film, visual art, literature), and the emergence of new discourses of knowledge in popular history.