Inspired by the writer Ba Jin's 1986 proposal for a “memorial museum” to the Cultural Revolution, the Harvard scholar Jie Li here offers a theoretically informed reflection on what such a project might involve. She envisages a museum encompassing not only the Cultural Revolution but the entire Mao era, since the various eruptions of Maoist revolutionary enthusiasm cannot be understood in isolation. Her vision of museums – their collections, exhibitionary techniques and social functions – also differs substantially from conventional notions. Deriding “the construction of vacant architectural monuments labelled as ‘museums’” – her apt description of standard Chinese practice (p. 262) – she sketches a more expansive prospectus, extending from literature to film and digital media.
In discussing memories of Maoism and questions of commemoration, Li adopts a “media ecological” approach, analysing “holistically” the “environment in which remembering and forgetting take place” (p. 9). She is interested especially in the “palimpsestic” quality of memory – of how it takes on new layers of meaning as it is passed down the generations. This process, she constantly reminds us, also involves “remediation,” as new media – most obviously of the digital variety – transform how we share and experience the traces of the past.
The book's main chapters guide us through various proposed “exhibits,” organized according to media types. A harrowing first chapter, “Blood testaments,” homes in on the dissident journalist Lin Zhao, imprisoned for years before her 1968 execution. Lin's writings, composed in her own blood on smuggled scraps of material, constitute a rare record of the disillusionment and betrayal experienced by a formerly ardent revolutionary. More plentiful, though still mostly inaccessible (unlike the Stasi records with which Li compares them), are the “Surveillance files” analysed in the second chapter. As Li explains, “dossier literature” can provide the basis for “nuanced stories of complicity, accommodation, and survival under socialism” (p. 98), even if, today as in the Maoist past, nuance often falls victim to strident partisanship.
A second brace of chapters deals with visual imagery. “Utopian photographs” discusses the role of photography as a “thought weapon” (p. 108), in an era when camera technologies were a state monopoly (p. 111). Maoist photography “contributed to the wreckage,” as when doctored images of abundance fuelled the “competitive revolutionary ardor” that led to the Great Leap famine (p. 123). This was a time when “images could kill” (p. 125). Still more stringently controlled than photography was film, so in “Foreign lenses” Li analyses the portrayal of Mao-era China in foreign documentary cinema – Antonioni's Chung Kuo and Ivens and Loridan's How Yukong Moved the Mountains. Foreign directors could occasionally capture aspects of daily life that their minders sought to conceal, but were nonetheless constrained by a Maoist mise-en-scène. Li includes an extraordinary account of Kashgar residents appearing as drilled extras before Ivens's and Loridan's cameras, testifying to the theatrical, ritualistic quality of life in Mao's China.
The work of Antonioni, Ivens and Loridan influenced a new generation of Chinese filmmakers, whose work is discussed in a chapter on “Factory rubble.” Focusing primarily on Wang Bing's West of the Tracks (2002), Jia Zhangke's 24 City (2008), and Zhang Meng's The Piano in a Factory (2011), Li analyses how these works chart the descent of the industrial proletariat from privileged Mao-era elite to marginalized underclass. Scarcely surprising, then, that many struggling today amidst spiralling social inequality have looked back with nostalgia on the Mao era. Nostalgia pervades the private Jianchuan Museum complex in Sichuan, discussed in a chapter on “Museums and memorials,” though “guerrilla exhibits” there also subtly challenge the positive mood (p. 246). The few sites explicitly commemorating the “trauma” of the Mao years have struggled to survive tightening suppression under Xi Jinping.
Li concludes with an epilogue addressing “future curators,” defined broadly as all who “excavate, account, exhibit, conserve and imagine” traces of the past. Lamenting widespread “amnesia” amidst a landscape of proliferating, vast but “vacant” museums, she stresses the importance of documenting and preserving, in readiness for a post-Xi thaw. At the same time, she urges against treating as passive victims those who lived under Maoism, reminding us to respect the agency and subjectivity of the “masses” turned “into media” in pursuit of its “utopian dreams” (p. 266).
How, though, did Maoism “turn the masses into media”? While extensively discussing the more glamorous manifestations of propaganda (photography, film, etc.), Li neglects its most important vehicle: schooling. She even fails to mention schooling in her epilogue, when proposing a “Museum of the Mao-era childhood” (p. 272). This omission is especially perplexing given her stress on the importance of ensuring that efforts to commemorate Maoism today engage school-age youth (pp. 272, 275, 276). The massification of primary schooling was arguably the most revolutionary achievement of the Mao years. And education was absolutely central to the Cultural Revolution, both as the object of anti-elitist attack, and as the focus of efforts at rural uplift. Plentiful documentation attests to the role of “sent-down” intellectuals and urban youth in staffing rudimentary village schools. As for celluloid traces of such activity, Chen Kaige's 1987 film King of the Children, based on Ah Cheng's novel, is an excellent resource.
The neglect of education as a Maoist legacy reflects a significant bias here towards the experiences of educated urbanites or industrial workers, rather than the rural masses. Li rightly points out that photographic evidence of the Great Leap famine is scant, and recounts how peasants were involved in manufacturing false images of abundance (to be circulated primarily amongst urban magazine readers). But what of other traces of the rural experience of Maoism, including schooling?
Perhaps constituting a further layer in the mnemonic “palimpsest,” Li's writing itself testifies to the resurgence of intellectual elitism following the utter defeat of radical Maoist egalitarianism. The language in which her arguments are couched is often opaque to those uninitiated into the mysteries of critical theory. The reader is treated to extensive discussions of “remediation” and “metonyms”; allusion to Barthes's “punctum” (p. 57); reflections on the “graphic power” of archives, conceived as “a kind of mnemotechnological invention” (a nod to Foucault, here) (p. 78); and a convoluted bon mot from Derrida to explain the power of the written word (or “written sign”; p. 77). At one point, the German term vogelfrei is used to gloss the English word “outlaw” (p. 51). Of Wang Bing's cinematography, Li writes that “ever responsive to the contingency of the pro-filmic event,” it “sketches out the contours of habitual arabesques…” (p. 199).
Even in a book series on Sinotheory, theory and specialist terminology should serve a clear explanatory purpose; when they don't, they should be stripped away in the interests of readability. The failure to do so here means that, despite the proclaimed aim of addressing a broad constituency of “future curators,” most actual curators are very unlikely to venture beyond the first few pages. This is a shame, because Li at her best writes with unusual insight and eloquence. Notwithstanding this book's omissions, readers equipped with sufficient patience and a good dictionary will find here a highly sophisticated, erudite and inspiring reflection on memories of Maoism and efforts at its memorialization.
