Review: Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era, by Jie Li

Abstract

In 1986 the writer Ba Jin called on his country to build a museum of the Cultural Revolution: “In order that everyone sees clearly and remembers clearly, it is necessary to build a museum of the ‘Cultural Revolution,’ exhibiting concrete and real objects, and reconstructing striking scenes which will testify to what took place on this Chinese soil twenty years ago!”1 China’s leaders have since acknowledged that Maoist extremism was a “mistake,” yet Ba Jin’s vision has never been realized and the general state of public amnesia about the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and the Anti-Rightist Movement persists. Jie Li attempts to fill that memory hole with a book that is in some ways a scholarly study of museums and memory, in some ways a proposal for a brick-and-mortar museum, and in some ways a virtual paper-and-ink Memorial Museum of the Mao Era.Jie Li specializes in the media and literature of Mao-era China, and in this book each of the first five chapters easily stand alone as academic studies of prison writings, dossiers, films, and photographs. Bound together they form an insightful, if somewhat episodic, commentary on the history and legacy of the Mao era. But Li is not content with a merely outstanding collection of essays; she wants to draw the reader across the line between book and museum. She wants them to stand as witnesses, to examine their own complicity in past events, and to remediate those events in the present.Unlike the many Chinese museums that are designed to avoid controversy, the exhibits of this virtual museum are intended to provoke. The “Blood Testaments” gallery examines the prison life of Lin Zhao who used her own blood to write poems, letters, and essays indicting the Maoist regime. The “Surveillance Files” gallery exhibits the prison dossier of Nie Gannu as evidence of the role that surveillance and betrayal played in Mao-era memory production. The virtual photo gallery reproduces images captured by Chinese and foreign photographers during the Great Leap Forward. The first of two virtual theatres screens films shot during the Cultural Revolution by foreign film crews, the second shows Chinese films shot in the post-socialist ruins of decaying industries. In the final chapter Li departs the Memorial Museum and visits Mao–era trauma sites and modern museums elsewhere in China, examining the constrained circumstances under which public memory of the Mao era is allowed to exist as little more than nostalgia.Given that it has no physical space, the virtual Memorial Museum of the Mao Era cannot satisfy Ba Jin’s demand for “real objects” and “striking scenes.” Without those artifacts the tone of the museum shifts from presence to absence. Lin Zhao’s blood testaments are said to have a corporeal quality, yet there are no bodies in the museum. With Nie Gannu’s physical dossier still under lock and key, the museum can only collect excerpts that have been smuggled out of the police archive. Fascinatingly, while the Great Leap Forward photo gallery exhibits propaganda, there are no photographs of the associated famine, not because the curator cannot accommodate them but because they simply do not exist. The screening of foreign documentaries in the theatre of the Cultural Revolution points to the fact that no Chinese documentary films were made during that entire era. Finally, although the theatre of post-socialist ruination does screen Chinese films, those films catalogue the destruction and emptiness of the Mao era industrial economy in the 1980s and 1990s.While there is not a lot to look at in the Memorial Museum of the Mao Era, there is much to think about. As docent and curator, Li demonstrates how absence is contrived to obscure the difficult past. She explains how to collect and manage the faint traces of the Maoist past and how to use new media to remake the old and transmit bygone testimonies to later generations. Mostly, she encourages us to explore the “utopian ruin” and listen for the conversations between Maoist ideals and the catastrophes that swallowed them up. That dialogue between utopia and ruin is central to understanding the memories of the Mao era as both nostalgia and trauma, and to understanding that the memorial museum must include both victimhood and complicity. Lin Zhao and Nie Gannu were “hot blooded” idealists destroyed by the “cold blood of state violence.” During the Great Leap Forward impassioned photographers traveled the country to seek out the “revolutionary miracle” and mobilize the population but were complicit in the famine that ensued. During the Cultural Revolution foreign film crews were invited to showcase the stage-managed achievements of the revolution, but also captured the unscripted quotidian reality. Factories and the “vanguard class” of industrial workers were once the pride of Mao’s China but are forgotten by a society that now privileges consumption over production.The exhibits described in this book suggest conflict and opposition, although in Li’s assessment the Memorial Museum of the Mao Era ought to be a place of mediation. Mediation between utopia and ruin, mediation between generations, and mediation between imagination and reality. In the final “Notes for Future Curators” Li suggests that the Memorial Museum operate like an inquest that collects documents, produces facts and truth, and cross-examines witnesses, demanding in the process that secondary witnesses come to terms with their own complicity. To facilitate the inquiry, the curator is advised to excavate utopian traces from the ruins and recount past lives in ways that do not reduce complex people to simple heroes and victims. They are advised to approach the traces of the past as forensic evidence to be examined with the goal of advancing truth and reconciliation. Finally, having recognized a “true past,” the curator would encourage the participant to imagine what they would have done differently in similar circumstances, because imagining a different past is part of imagining a different future.