Abstract
Despite vast reforms, the official line on recent history remains a tool for curbing dissent.
In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has officially acknowledged the devastating effects of the most contested events in recent Chinese history: the Great Leap Forward (1959-61) and the Cultural Revolution (late 1960s-early 1970s). Its acknowledgement has been tardy, selective and partial, as has any admission of guilt. The party wishes to distance itself from these events, so it is willing to criticise them, to an extent.
In comparison, officials adopt a much more selective approach when dealing with more recent events, such as the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. The official narrative tries to make people forget what happened, or at best, ignore it. Selective amnesia has become a propaganda tool.
In the absence of even informal acceptance of the truth, memories of events like Tiananmen – but also agonising, personal events that are largely unseen by the international community, such as the loss of a home or farm at the hands of corrupt officials – turn into irrepressible traumas or, as Chinese tradition would have it, ‘hungry ghosts’.
Official efforts to suppress history, or to sustain an inaccurate official narrative, are continually undermined by people’s own memories and memorials. Losses and tragedies are commemorated in rough-and-ready monuments in fields and on roadsides. These symbols are embedded in Chinese culture through the widespread belief in ‘hungry ghosts’ – spiritual beings driven by strong emotional determination who return to satisfy unfulfilled cravings.
A larger political and social canvas for memory is contemporary art – in the work of Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan for example. In literature, too, writers like Ma Jian, in his novel about the Tiananmen protests, Beijing Coma, and Xinran, in her accounts of Tibet, the Cultural Revolution and the lives of contemporary Chinese women, draw attention to unhappy memories and troubling, lasting emotions.
Memory and truth fall victim to political gain
After endless drafting and re-drafting, the Central Committee of the Communist Party finally passed a resolution in 1987, two decades after both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, criticising but not reviling the events.
According to the resolution, the famine engendered by Mao’s crazy drive for industrialisation during the Great Leap Forward can be attributed to ‘opportunism together with a succession of natural calamities and the perfidious scrapping of contracts by the Soviet Government’. This meant, the resolution declared, that China’s ‘economy encountered certain difficulties between 1959 and 1961, which caused serious losses’ to the country and its people. This is a highly coded and euphemistic dilution of the gross mistakes made by Chairman Mao and other leaders. The consequences for ordinary people – more than 40 million deaths, according to Frank Dikotter’s authoritative 2010 book Mao’s Great Famine – are swept out of view. Nor is there much suggestion of remorse on the part of leaders.
By contrast, the Cultural Revolution is denounced unequivocally in the same 1987 Central Committee resolution: ‘the Cultural Revolution, initiated by a leader labouring under a misapprehension and capitalised on by counterrevolutionary cliques, led to domestic turmoil and brought catastrophe to the Party, the state and the whole people’. Why the restraint about one and the categorical condemnation of the other? Because the still revered Deng Xiaoping was implicated in the Great Leap Forward, whereas, during the Cultural Revolution, he had been denounced and sent into exile.
Authorised memory becomes not a question of historical record but instead a hagiography of certain past officials at the expense of others – all in the name of legitimating these current leaders, who all claim allegiance to Deng. Since the underlying power struggle between reform and authoritarianism continues unabated, arguments about historical record can often be proxies for contemporary political divisions. Memory and truth fall by the wayside.
In 2003, Jiang Yanyong became a national hero when he revealed the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) crisis. As a doctor, he knew the number of cases being reported had been severely underreported and played down by the authorities, so, in a letter to Time magazine, he raised the alarm. It is believed that his actions prevented the disease from reaching pandemic proportions.
Jiang had worked at a military hospital in Beijing during the Tiananmen protests and had seen firsthand the injuries that protesters had sustained at the hands of the army. In 2004, he stated publicly that ‘the 4 June student movement should be reappraised as a patriotic movement’. He was arrested and subjected to political re-education for 45 days. But his hero status both on domestic and international stages ensured he was released without charge. However, he was denied the right to travel to the US to receive an award in 2007. In an article published in the New Republic in July 2008, Jiang told journalist Phillip Pan that he was under constant surveillance. He was trying not to antagonise the authorities because he wanted to visit his daughter and grandson in California.
A ‘hungry ghost’, Songzanlin, buddhist monastery, Shangri-La, Yunnan Province. Hungry ghosts represent the frustration and unsatisfied hunger of repressed memories
Despite the silence about Tiananmen, from 2002 onwards, under Premier Wen Jiabao, the authorities seemed to grow more sympathetic to people’s sufferings, even when official incompetence, corruption and cover-ups were to blame.
After the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 – in which about 68,000 people died – Wen rushed to the scene to help dig out the survivors. A television crew was constantly on site. The news featured pictures of a concerned, scruffy premier mucking in the rescue effort. The news of the tragedy of the earthquake was not censored or suppressed, as natural disasters had been under Mao.
Official efforts to suppress history result in trauma. Protesters arriving at Tiannmen Square, May 1989
But the authorities soon felt the need to tighten their grip. Many shoddily-built schools collapsed after the earthquake, killing all the pupils inside. Nearly 7000 classrooms collapsed; close to 5000 children died and more than 16,000 were injured. Better-built Communist Party offices, however, remained sturdy and standing, the officials working in them shaken but unharmed. Parents held vigils and memorials for their lost children, most of them, of course, an only child. Officials quickly insisted such gatherings should be stopped and locals were forbidden from talking to foreign reporters. One man told the Guardian during a phone interview in August 2008, ‘now they don’t even allow us to gather together … I guess that they hope that if the time is long enough we will just forget this’.
Selected amnesia has become a propaganda tool
The stirring ghosts of memory
Traumatic events do not go away. They stick in the mind if ignored or suppressed. The urge to forget painful memories competes with the sometimes unwanted inevitability of remembering. Flashbacks, neuroses and repetitive destructive patterns of behaviour are all said to spring from uncontrollable remembering. The idea of unforgettable, disturbing memories has entered the weft and warp of Chinese tradition and spirituality. Nowhere more than in China is folk wisdom and mythology better stocked with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their story is told. Qingming, the festival of the propitiation of hungry ghosts ardently observed across the country, is testament to that. Unhappy memories become hungry ghosts in China.
In order to satiate these hungry ghosts, people must recover. According to traumatic stress expert Judith Lewis Herman in her book Trauma and Recovery:
Recovery requires remembrance and mourning … Restoring a sense of social community requires a public forum where victims can speak their truth and their suffering can be formally acknowledged … Any lasting peace requires an organised effort to hold individual perpetrators accountable for their crimes … If there is no hope of justice, the helpless rage of victimised groups can fester, impervious to the passage of time.
Memories of trauma, in other words, refuse to be censored. Instead, the memories can become a kind of trauma, a monument to reconciled memory.
Great historical tragedies are not the only source of traumatic memories. Official policy that leads to enormous personal loss and suffering can be just as lasting and powerful for individuals. The one-child policy, which has been enforced since the early 1980s (although there are exemptions for some rural families, ethnic minorities and couples who are both single children), continues to scar children, parents and grandparents. The work of writer and radio broadcaster Xinran draws on numerous interviews with the laobaixing (literally ‘the old hundred names’, meaning the ordinary people). One mother who was forced to abandon her daughter because her husband and family only wanted a boy told Xinran: ‘the pain of missing her so much tears me apart, until I actually felt it gives me a real, physical heart attack’.
Art is also an ineradicable collective space for lasting memory that undermines official political discourse. The Beijing Spring in the early 1990s produced many iconic, politically subversive conceptual works. One of the most memorable was the work of Zhang Huan, who covered his body with honey and sat motionless in a public toilet as flies gathered, landed and stuck all over him. Once covered with flies, he waded into a filthy storm-water drain to wash them off. His views on the decadent state of Chinese society and politics were unmistakable.
Much of the work of Ai Weiwei can be seen as a meditation on loss and authoritarian efforts to destroy the traditions within which memories are held. His iconic photographs depicting himself dropping and smashing a Han dynasty urn brought him to international attention. He filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with porcelain sunflower seeds in memory of the only things that people had left to eat during the Great Famine. When the artist visited the scene of the Sichuan earthquake, all that remained of the collapsed schools were plastic rucksacks. In 2009, his installation at the Haus der Kunst museum in Munich featured 9000 children’s backpacks, which covered the outside of the building. The installation featured the words ‘She lived happily for seven years in this world’ – a quote from the mother of a dead schoolchild – in giant Mandarin characters.
Memory cannot be censored. Representations of memory travel through art into a boundless space of civic consciousness where experience and trauma can be reflected upon, debated, learned from, reconciled with – but never forgotten. The alternative, according to Ai Weiwei, is madness: ‘The emptiness of collective memory, this distortion of public morality, drives people crazy.’