History and Memory in the Marketplace

The years 2006 and 2016 marked the most recent 40^th and 50^th anniversaries of the onset of the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (CR).¹ Within China, responses to these two anniversaries were kept at a very low profile. There were no newspaper, radio or TV broadcasting to memorialize or reflect on the political movement in China’s recent history in any form.² Internet search engines had been filtered to block information relevant to the Cultural Revolution.³ In fact, there has never been any form of official commemoration on any anniversary of the onset, or ending, of the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) set its tone in the 1981 “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China,” passed by the Sixth Plenum of the Eleventh Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee.⁴ This document set the rules for future history writing about the Cultural Revolution: The Cultural Revolution was a 10-year disaster. It was one of Mao’s mistakes, but it, however, cannot overshadow his contributions. Forty some years after the Cultural Revolution ended, there has not been a deliberate and thorough reckoning of the Cultural Revolutionary history within China. The reality is that people who have lived through the turbulent time of Cultural Revolution are being repressed from freely articulating their CR experiences, and are growing old and dying. History textbooks in China only spare a couple of lines to talk about it, which basically restate the official rhetoric from the 1981 “Resolution.” Although a vast body of ←1 | 2→literature has been produced since the late 1970s aiming to present the traumatic experiences of the CR past, as Xu Zidong’s study shows, it mainly conforms to the official rhetoric about the Cultural Revolution and therefore cannot be taken as collective memory.⁵ Thus, the history of the Cultural Revolution is a virtual void in China. This vacuum in the CR history has resulted in the ignorance of the people who were born after the Cultural Revolution. According to a survey done by a student at Zhongshan University, only 19% of the students say they “know a lot about the Cultural Revolution,” 73% of the students say they “have some knowledge” about it. Twenty-two percent of the students do not know the year of the onset of the Cultural Revolution; among those who claim they know, 22% write the wrong year. The survey finds out that for particular CR expressions, a large number of students frankly state that they “do not know/never heard of it.” Also according to the survey, 43% of the students state that it is “comparatively difficult” to find channels for knowledge about the Cultural Revolution. The survey shows that 47% of the students think that the launch of the Cultural Revolution was “unnecessary.” However, this number is not as impressive when 27% “never thought about it/do not know,” and another 19% agree that there must be some necessary reason for the launching of the Cultural Revolution, and another 5% believe the Cultural Revolution was “necessary.”⁶ Things are even worse for younger students. One news article reports that according to a survey in a Beijing middle school class, only half of the 36 students know that the government has condemned the Cultural Revolution. Of them, 22.2% still believe that the government has validated the correctness of the Cultural Revolution; another 19.4% of students think that there must be some validity to the events of the Cultural Revolution, as well as some positive accomplishments.⁷ As time goes on, knowledge and memory of the CR found in young Chinese have proven to be even less.⁸ The CR history will soon be forgotten.

Added to the already serious problem of potentially leaving the CR past in a total oblivion, in the past two decades, there have appeared some changes in how the Cultural Revolution is remembered; versions of the CR past appeared to be drastically different from the previous preoccupation with traumatic experiences in narratives. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, almost every Taxi in China had a framed picture of Mao hanging from the rearview mirror. Mao’s pictures became the final touch ensuring best-selling status even on the covers of Beepers and lighters. All sorts of memoirs about Mao’s public and private life proliferated and swept the nation’s book market.

In the early to mid-1990s, Cultural Revolution–themed restaurants emerged in China at an explosive speed, attracting old and young customers with both delicious foods and the so-called Cultural Revolution culture. Mao fever was followed ←2 | 3→immediately by the fever of former “Sent-down youth” returning to the countryside. At about the same time, Cui Jian’s revision of the Red Canon songs rocked the hearts of Chinese people. In 1995, Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun broke China’s box-office record with its rather idyllic, sunny, and warm memory of the Cultural Revolution, winning from its audience a deeply nostalgic sigh.

In order to demonstrate this change, or rather this “rift,”⁹ as Yomi Braester terms it, in the memory of the CR, I shall briefly outline some of the major waves in post-CR literature in the following. In the late 1970s, soon after Mao’s death, there emerged scar literature (or literature of the wounded) responding to the recently passed CR disaster. It is generally agreed that Liu Xinhua’s 1978 story “Scar” inaugurated and also named this type of literature. Other major works include Liu Xinwu’s Banzhuren (The Class Counselor),¹⁰ Zhang Xianliang’s Ling yu rou (Soul and Body),¹¹ Ye Xin’s Cuotuo suiyue (Wasted Time),¹² among others. Scar literature makes the physical and emotional sufferings of the cadres and intellectuals central to its presentation of the Cultural Revolution. Although focusing on oppression and trauma, scar literature in general maintained love and faith as its major themes. It blamed the Gang of Four for the wrongs, “embraced love as a key to solving social problems,”¹³ and believed in the Party’s ability to rectify the past calamities. Scar literature became very popular in the 1980s, because the outrage expressed by its ←3 | 4→works resonated with the public and had a powerful cathartic effect. The Party initially tolerated scar literature because it helped to vent the widespread resentment while deflecting anger from the Party and the current regime. But when criticism of the Party and Mao grew, in conjunction with the increased exposure of current social problems, the Party began to take procedures to crack down on this wave of literature.¹⁴