The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Year ...

regime? Who gave the orders? Who executed the orders? What was the grand design? Who benefited?”¹⁹ Such questions still need to be asked in China with respect to a number of historical events. Among these are the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Incident, and the shabby construction of schools that collapsed in the great earthquake in Sichuan in 2008. Other events for which answers are still needed include the Great Famine, the Three Gorges Dam project, and the imprisonment of many human rights activists. At this point in time, it is difficult to imagine that the Chinese government will sanction or authorize a nongovernmental organization to set up a truth commission to look into the atrocities that took place throughout the Mao era and after. At present, the next best thing is to have a vibrant Internet community where Chinese individuals who have experienced and/or witnessed violence, brutality, and corruption can record their personal memories and testimonies.

In debating truth versus justice, Suleiman cautions that we must be wary of people who call for forgiving and forgetting as the way to move on: “It is one thing if a disinterested party declares the value of moving forward, of not letting the past paralyze one; it is quite another thing if the perpetrator does so.”²⁰ The underlying challenge here is to gauge how much remembering is too much, and how much forgetting is too much. Letting the past paralyze one, becoming trapped in the repetition of unreflective memories, suggests too much remembering, which can in turn lead to symptoms resembling the acting out of a traumatized patient. But the value of moving forward, running the risk of amnesia by jettisoning memories without subjecting them to self-aware criticism, implies too much forgetting. I would venture to argue that contemporary Chinese society’s collective memory lite of the Maoist past is too much unreflective remembering and too much uncritical forgetting.

Too much remembering and too much forgetting are abuses of memory. The use and abuse of memory point to the ethical dimension of memory. In his canonical book Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur argues that the ultimate aim in the use of memory is truth; abuse of memory