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

particular characteristic is essential to our understanding of the human cost of traumatic events and guides our examination of various texts in this study.

A Crisis of Memory

The formation of memory, whether individual or collective, can always be shaped by the larger environment. In recounting personal experiences of the Mao era, the Chinese environment is overburdened with both government control and self-imposed censorship. The Chinese government has encouraged a lite version of such remembrance; in other words, one is free to remark about the positive aspects of such experiences or the bitterness of the sufferings, so long as the narrative is restricted to personal matters. Overt attempts to discuss the causes and ramifications of the violence and its tragic consequences are unacceptable. More often than not, media representations of the prereform era in popular television series and historical documentaries are sanitized to portray a righteous Communist Party fighting through hardship to achieve glory. Mao-style performances on occasional variety shows are always glamorized with costumes bearing shallow resemblances to the look of that era in an attempt to evoke a sense of nostalgia and exoticism.⁶

The rationale for the Chinese government’s continued censorship of certain critical events of the Maoist past (such as the Cultural Revolution) and the more recent past (such as the June Fourth Tiananmen Incident) has always been presented as being necessary to sustain social harmony and cohesion in a complex nation like China. The only exceptions to this censorship are the now-defunct Nanfang zhoubao 南方周报 (Southern weekly), which was widely popular and provided news and articles not usually found in traditional newspapers, and the former Yanhuang chunqiu 炎黄春秋 (China chronicle), which had the strong support of intellectuals and senior veteran liberal party elders. Public discussions of the June Fourth Tiananmen Incident are strictly prohibited. The Mao era is a less controlled topic, but the Chinese government does impose