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

families, as found in their testimonies in the literature and numerous memoirs and autobiographies published since Mao’s death? These written and published individual recollections will contribute significantly to the formation of a collective memory of the Mao era. Together with the Communist Party’s official documentation of the Maoist past and the array of scholarly views and interpretations, these private and imaginative memory writings complement the collective discourse precisely because they derive from a broad spectrum of writers and are public and popular acts of remembering.

Memory is important because it holds on to historical details and can supplement official history and aid historiography. Memory is not an apprehension of past events; rather, it is self-representation of past experiences and, more important, a critical self-reflection of the present and re-creation of the events of the past. Therefore, ethics is imperative in remembering because for memory to count as history and to be meaningful as testimony, the remembering must be honest and done in good faith. As Suleiman asks, “How is memory best served at a given moment, in a specific place? And who does the judging, to what end?”¹³ Given this, I will next frame Mao’s political campaigns by foregrounding the human dimension in the consequences of these events and argue that they must be categorized as human atrocities. It is only by establishing such an interpretive frame that we can begin looking at memories of the Mao era as testimony. However, to uncover how memory can serve as testimony to historical events, we must first identify the uses and abuses of memory.

Uses and Abuses of Memory

Those who voluntarily come forward to tell their personal experiences of a collective historical trauma only rarely present instances of their perpetration. Most of the literature on the Holocaust is about victimhood. Almost all the popular publications on the Cultural Revolution center on individual victimhood. This raises the questions of who remembers,