Jottings from the Granite Studio

I’ve said this before in other places, but the question of historical memory is tricky because it involves not only abstract concepts such as ’states’ or ‘nations,’ but because–as in the case of the Cultural Revolution–the past for many people is quite personal.

We show a documentary on the GPCR each year to our lower-division Chinese history survey. In one interview, a prim woman in her 40s sits in her stylish Beijing apartment and talks calmly about how, when she was a girl in the late 1960s, a group of her friends were going to go that night to the home of their school principal to ’struggle with him.’ According to the woman, she arrived late–to find that her friends had already beaten the old man to death. She asks the camera: What would I have done if I had been there, too? Would I have beaten the man also?

Events such as slavery become History for many reasons, separation by time can play a part. So can the way the story is told. Germans can criticize their past atrocities as the work of ‘Nazis.’ Americans can view slavery as the ‘peculiar institution’ of a defeated group of plantation owners. These stories are alternate narratives that allow people today to re-remember the atrocities of our ancestors in ways more psychologically comforting than directly confronting ‘the truth’.

But for many Chinese, including a whole generation lost, the past is present. The memories of Cultural Revolution continue to play a role in the decisions that people make in their daily lives, including the decision, by some, to forget that which they would rather not remember.

As the American author Eric Hoffer once wrote about mass movements in general:

“There are many who find the burdens, the anxiety, and the isolation of an individual existence unbearable. This is particularly true when the opportunities for self-advancement are relatively meager, and one’s individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for. Such persons sooner or later turn their backs on an individual existence and strive to acquire a sense of worth and a purpose by an identification with a holy cause, a leader, or a movement. The faith and pride they derive from such an identification serve them as substitutes for the unattainable self-confidence and self-respect.”

I wonder if such a sentiment is more true of China’s recent past or its future.

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top right picture courtesy of Stefan Landsberger’s Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages. Landsberger’s site is a treasure trove and a truly fabulous website for anyone interested in 20th century Chinese history.