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heavily ideological—tainting the carefully constructed image it wanted the world to see.
Yet, this hidden history is very much part of China’s identity. Among modern China’s many tragedies, one that is rarely mentioned, if at all, is government censorship of the Chinese people’s right to remember the traumas of various Maoist political campaigns, particularly Land Reform (1947–1950), the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957), the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), the Great Famine (1958–1962), and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).
Ironically, it was the failure in nation building and, in particular, the extensive chaos and disruption of the Cultural Revolution, that paved the way for China to put on such a show at the Summer Olympics. It was the failure of Mao’s campaigns that opened the door to Deng Xiaoping, who moved China’s modernization project in a different direction, toward a capitalist-style market economy—what Deng called “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” It was Deng’s economic reform policies that led China to become a formidable global power; Deng brought China out of the poverty that was Mao’s doing. It was not only the economy that collapsed under Mao; his campaigns also led to the destruction of China’s moral fabric. Not only did millions of innocent people die because the famine brought on by Mao’s Great Leap Forward, his Cultural Revolution also snuffed out the essence of Chinese society.
It is now forty years after Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, and more than fifty years since the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine. During this time, the collective memory of these events has been sanitized, reduced to a much-diluted version of what truly took place. Historical and sociological approaches cannot fully address the moral failure that allowed the atrocities of the Mao era to take place. Humanist approaches, such as literary criticism, have a central role to play in uncovering and making explicit the testimonies of both victims and perpetrators in “memory writing” in order to recover the truth of China’s history.