Organizer: Jian Guo, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater
Chair: Edward Friedman, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussant: Frederic Wakeman, University of California, Berkeley
As part of a general effort to revise and correct official versions of history, to recapture its authentic moments, and to re-interpret it from vantage point of contemporary experience, much intellectual/scholarly work was produced in mainland China and abroad in the late 70s through the late 90s that takes the form of remembrance of things past. Meanwhile, as demonstrated time and again in Chinese history, looking into the past can also be a strategy for confronting the present and articulating a political and ideological position especially when current issues and ideas appear to be too sensitive for public discussion and debate. In the past two decades, the renewed interest in classical liberal humanism, the revival of traditional Chinese scholarship, the discovery of an "Asian" model of modernization, and the importation of contemporary Western postmodern theory led to a lively cultural discussion in mainland China. Diverse perspectives engaging in the discussion, along with the still influential official discourse, invariably embrace history to address present concerns, such that memory—say, of political events such as the student movement of 1989, the Cultural Revolution, and the May Fourth movement, and of previously ignored or dismissed historical figures like Liang Shuming, Chen Yinque, Hu Feng, etc.—is heavily tested and contested, and greatly politicized. Memory is further problematized in the age of rapid economic reform, since the trend of marketization tends to turn everything, including the past, into commodity. This panel proposes to examine the ways memory is explored, and often exploited, in the ongoing cultural debate since the late 70s. Participants will access certain current political discourses in light of their construction of the past.
Selective Memory and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76)
Youqin Wang, Stanford University
Over the past several years, I have conducted three hundred interviews and collected documents on how the events of 1966–69 played out in schools across China. During this period, schools became the sites of a series of violent student attacks on teachers. This violence against teachers is one part of the unreported side of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76). In the course of my research, I have found gaps between what occurred and what was reported, between the reports made during and after the Revolution, between the descriptions of Chinese authorities and ordinary people after the Revolution, between the writings that were allowed to be published and those that were banned, and between the reminiscences of victims, perpetrators and bystanders. Through an examination of what people have remembered and what they have forgotten, this paper analyzes how ideology, power, vested interests, psychological trauma, and moral values continue to shape memories of the Revolution.
Memory, Forgetting, and New Cultural Conservatism
Ben Xu, St. Mary’s College, California
In China, much of the nineties’ recollection and reevaluation of the eighties, cultural criticism is done in terms of a new pairing of radicalism and conservatism. Such recollection and reevaluation are often characterized by a condemnation of the eighties, cultural criticism and its pro-democracy and pro-enlightenment concerns as too "radical." "Anti-radicalism" is not simply a subject of discussion among Chinese intellectuals who reflect on past events and trends; it has become a crucial element in shaping the nineties’ new cultural conservatism in China.
Cultural conservatism in China used to have a more negative tone, carping about the erosion of China’s tradition and cultural heritage but offering few alternatives. In the 1990s, new cultural conservatism has taken on a more positive cast with an agenda of attacking radicalism and political romanticism, emphasizing Chinese values as an exclusive resource for initiating social change and rebuilding national identity.
The anti-radical rhetoric of neoconservative arguments should be seen not so much in terms of its relevance as an explanation of the necessity of intellectual moderation but as an ideology integral to post-1989 reality. The reality of combined political authoritarianism and economic marketization seems to be feasible and worth conserving, or too powerful to be deflected from its course by ordinary citizens’ interference. The distinction between radicalism and conservatism in China thus becomes part of the analysis of the dynamics of the status quo as well as the concurring popular complacency and political apathy.
Sentimental Nationalism: Its Uses and Abuses and Mnemonic Disquiet
Toming Jun Liu, California State University, Los Angeles
Ever since China decided to be part of global modernization, sentimental nationalism, insofar as it inspires cultural and political disquiet, has caused problems in historicizing China’s past. In the 1980s, nationalist sentiments were often viewed as a barrier to cosmopolitanism needed for modernization; in the influential River Elegy (1988), the attempt to curb or reshape national sentiments led to a transformation of metaphors central in narrating China’s past. In the 1990’s, in the aftermath of Tiananmen, sentimental nationalism, encouraged and abused, entered the vacuum of China’s ideology; the discourse of China Can Say No shows some glaring patterns of forgetting, betraying another kind of mnemonic disquiet.
The uses and abuses of sentimental nationalism is a common phenomenon in the process modernization. To gain a proper perspective, I seek analogies from European and Chinese histories. Herder’s theory of "climate," now the basis of regionalism, indicates that sentimental nationalism is the most intimate form of cultural identity. On the other hand, the age of navigation introduced other civilizations and cosmopolitanism in tension with nationalism. River perhaps overemphasized cosmopolitanism and unwittingly slighted sentimental nationalism. Chinese history witnesses an increasing humanization of nature to the extent landscape markers take on nationalist sentimental values more than in any other culture. River’s metaphorical deconstruction of some key markers shows a dichotomy typical of May 4th culture which, when tipped off balance, becomes "self-orientalization."
The problem of Say No is that it seeks to inflame sentimental nationalism "where and when rational nationalism, the basis of modern day internationalism (or Kant’s "league of nations"), is needed. As the history of Western colonialism in China shows a willful disregard of rational internationalism, the Chinese government responsible for Tiananmen violates the same rationale. But Say No attempts to recall histories of "colonialism" and "containment" in order to repress the real reasons of Chinese government’s most recent isolation in the world.
The Wound of Memory, Historical Amnesia, and the Carnivalization of the Cultural Revolution
Jian Guo, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater
Under the pressure of government censorship in the past twenty years, the Cultural Revolution has become such a sensitive topic in mainland China that older generations reluctantly detach themselves from it while younger generations find the issue increasingly alien and irrelevant. While authentic, reflexive, and mature histories of the late 60s and early 70s are few, a new trend is on the rise in recent Chinese literature and art that explores in the name of private memories the "comic," "sunny" aspects of the Cultural Revolution. China’s "Post-New" (post-1989) cultural theorists regard this new trend as an instance of postmodern "multiplicity" that problematizes both the 1980s "official" "anti-Cultural Revolution historical narrative" and the Western image of a politically repressive China. The New Leftists among Chinese scholars abroad, on the other hand, follow a Western neo-Marxist line of thought and begin to highlight a "festive" and "carnivalesque" spirit of the 60s in their apology for the Cultural Revolution. What informs both postmodern and ultra-leftist readings of China’s recent history is a Western discourse which, whatever its values in the contemporary West, is yet to disengage itself from an entanglement with the Chinese 60s. Embracing Western discourse out of context, the "Post-New" critics and the New Leftists are creating a theoretical high fashion only to damage further the already fragile memory of China’s recent catastrophe.