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

communities to monitor current domestic and international economic activities, issues concerning civil justice, and social policies. For example, the Long March Space in Beijing, in its Long March Project, used one of the most celebrated party revolutionary experiences as an occasion to invite artists and ordinary citizens to participate in the collection of local memories by retracing the historical Long March route. Most noticeably, the participants produced a series of artworks in various visual forms, such as Qin Ga’s The Miniature Long March: A Walking Visual Display, in remembrance of the thousands of villages and townships along the Long March routes that have now, ironically, been largely wiped out by the Three Gorges Dam project.

The dam project is itself one of the worst violations of human rights by the Chinese government in the post-Mao era. According to studies conducted by Brooke Wilmsen and Michael Webber, the dam project has displaced 1.13 million people, and the water level raised by the dam has submerged twenty counties or municipal districts, 227 townships, 1,680 villages, and 23,800 hectares of farmland.⁸ Fortunately, there are recordings of this sobering event, but emotional expressions are largely curtailed. Dai Qing, an activist and an investigative journalist, has been in the forefront protesting against the dam project since the early days. Her effort has brought both domestic and international attention to the devastating consequences to the environment and people living in the areas surrounding the dam.⁹ Another notable endeavor comes from artists. Between October 2, 2008, and January 25, 2009, four leading Chinese artists, Chen Qiulin, Yun-Fei Ji, Liu Xiaodong, and Zhang Hui, held a joint art exhibit titled “Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art” in the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago¹⁰ to represent the magnitude of human costs of the dam project, such as forced migration, destruction of local cultures and landscapes, and demolition of archaeological sites. The expressions captured in these artists’ works are generally apolitical in tone and personal in nature, but they are powerful and mesmerizing.