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

The Chinese government has set parameters meant to control the expression of grievances. Such restrictions notwithstanding, Chinese society has become more open with the country’s rapid economic development and the emergence of a formidable middle class. The wide availability of cell phones and the Internet, along with social media and micro blogging, now allow information to spread quickly and networks to form. Although government restrictions can clamp down on social media, the resilience of Chinese netizens should not be underestimated. Even under such government-controlled conditions, there has been a memory boom in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century. Collective memory of the Mao era is no longer in the hands of the government; it is now shaped by the media, consumer markets, and private individuals, both online and in print. Four decades following Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, memory discourses regarding the Mao era have become so diverse and divergent that we may well be witnessing “a crisis of memory,” as defined by Susan Rubin Suleiman.

Suleiman frames her studies of memories of World War II with the notion of “a crisis of memory” and construes her chosen texts and films as “affairs of memory.” In her formulation, a crisis of memory is a critical juncture where there appear conflicts “between personal memory and collective memory, between what matters to an individual and what matters to a larger group.”¹¹ In the course of individual and group remembrances of a past, there comes a moment when choices must be made or conflicts resolved between varied memories, understood as self-representation and critical self-reflection of the past. Personal memory and collective memory may collide, overlap, or meet somewhere in between. What Suleiman calls “an affair of memory” points to the tension created by divergent individual remembrance and public understanding of a past event “whose aftereffects are still deeply felt.”¹² The task of the investigator is to create a different interpretive frame within which to explore such affairs of memory. Today, representations of the Maoist past have reached this point of crisis. We have begun to see competing memory discourses not only between the government’s version and popular media