Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era

Abstract

History and memory have been the foci of Chinese studies during the past two decades in the Anglophone sphere. Informed by New Historicism and the trauma theories that flourished after World War II, scholars in Chinese studies have reached a consensus on the role of power in both historiography and memory formation. This power, whether in the authoritarian or democratic system, is primarily executed top-down.Jie Li's Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era investigates an alternative to the top-down execution of memory formation: what multivalent stakeholders—no matter how insignificant they seem to be—can contribute to memory formation and memorialization. Li blurs the dichotomies in the discourse of memory: elites versus grassroots, official versus unofficial, public versus. private, and collective versus individual. The dismissal of binarism is built on the fluidity even between the two extremes of power. With the case of the police files of Nie Gannu, Li demonstrates how later generations can reclaim and remediate the state's technology of surveillance against the official historiography. This involution within the mainstream accounts against the official historiography illustrates that even the most established memory can be challenged and testified toward the opposite orientation from within.Utopian Ruins is more a study of the media of memory than of memory itself. Li switches the focus from memory as a result to the process of memory formation. She examines five forms of media that contributed to the shaping of memory during the Mao era: blood in writing during the One Hundred Flowers Movement, surveillance files in the Anti-Rightest Campaign, photography in the Great Leap Forward, film during the Socialist construction, and artifacts from the Cultural Revolution. As the form rather than the content of remembrance is the emphasis, mediation and indeed remediation become a central issue. Li adopts an illustrative analogy—palimpsest—to describe the constant process through which one type of memory forms yet is erased and replaced by another. Thus remediation, as a long-standing practice, allows people not in power to partake in memory formation guided by their conscience and confidence.Studies of Maoist China usually feature one of the political campaigns from 1949 to 1976, such as the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. Li applies a holistic and coherent view of Mao's era by privileging continuity over rupture. Although an account of Mao's China guided with this integrative approach may seem teleological to some, Utopian Ruins points to a perpetual tendency throughout the socialist period: first, utopia is both means and ends; second, the predominance of utopia directly leads to a denial of reality, which unavoidably causes ruin.As the Communist legacy is divided between the “Leftists” and the “Liberals,” how Maoist China is and should be remembered diverges and is even dramatically contradictory. Li tries to reconcile between the polarized narratives of demonization and deification. While she acknowledges the vehement disagreements about the Mao years, Li's efforts in reaching a shared understanding of the contradictory memories will be appreciated more by the “Liberals” than the “Leftists.” The current political climate in China leaves very little room for any nonconforming voice, not to mention dissent. No matter how nonpartisan one claims to be, if one does not hew to the prevailing glorification by advocating any memory not officially sanctioned, the voicing of such a view can be easily silenced and demonized. When the disastrous past (the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution) is a taboo subject, and even remembering victims in the unprecedented flood in Henan Province recently is forbidden, any effort to remember the losses and casualties during the socialist period will unavoidably encounter heavy censorship. In the foreseeable future, China will be even less tolerant of any memorial space given to catastrophes of its own past. In light of the constraining political atmosphere, Li's vision about a future memorial museum of the cataclysms that played out during Mao's China may seem as idealistic as Ba Jin's when he proposed the founding of a Cultural Revolution museum four decades ago.Utopian Ruins is premised on the potential of masses as a medium—the masses' access to diverse media in memory construction. The masses used to be thought of as passive recipients of messages and propaganda. Li demonstrates that the masses can secure their own agency by noting, for example, that Wang Jingyao consciously documented the loss of his wife to mob violence. Such foresight of collecting forensic evidence is limited to a very few enlightened intellectuals. Collective consciousness of advocacy for justice and resistance to unfairness has yet to form. Technological advances in China only reinforce conformative nationalism rather than create spaces of dissidence. Masses as media seem to contribute more to neo-authoritarianism as people respond to the government's massive call for informing on “anti-party/government” remarks or acts. It forebodes a dubious future for utilizing the internet or social media to build counter-memories.Animated by mesmerizing stories, each of the six chapters of Utopian Ruins exemplifies a model of scholarship that seamlessly interconnects solid archival digging, informed theoretical guidance, and holistic yet nuanced in-depth analysis. Although each period could be the subject of an independent monograph, the cases together speak to each other and fit in the creative yet coherent structure of the book. Li does not avoid disagreeing with the established practice of comparing the Cultural Revolution to the Holocaust, but she opts for the model of remembering the Holocaust victims when proposing the prototype of a memorial museum of the Cultural Revolution. This contradiction can be explained by the chasm between the study of a historical event and the practice of its remembrance.Li writes with a strong sense of urgency as the first-hand lived experiences of the disasters during the Mao era fade away, while the official historiography only features the achievements, which are exaggerated, and purposefully avoids the failures. She recognizes this crisis but endeavors to transform it into an opportunity to reconstruct the historical discourse about China's socialist past through remediation. This book points out several directions for constructing a holistic knowledge about socialist history and conducting the necessary remembrances of calamities. Her activist engagement with a just memorialization of the Mao era expresses an academic's most profound humanistic concern for the millions of deaths obscured by anonymity. As a courageous pioneering act of resisting the massive amnesia of insurmountable loss throughout the Mao era, Utopian Ruins paves a new direction for curators to design their future exhibitions of what Mao's China was like. We are eager to see that the gap between such “utopian” museums and the dystopian reality will be bridgeable, hopefully sooner than later.