Martin Fromm's book explores the politics surrounding the production and distribution of wenshi ziliao (“cultural and historical materials”) in Heilongjiang Province on the China–Russia border in the 1980s. Wenshi ziliao were eyewitness testimonies of historical events the Chinese Communist Party deemed significant. Although similar oral history projects had been conducted in the 1950s, Fromm argues that they took on new significance in the early post-Mao years as the Party tried to reestablish political authority and prepare the country for market reforms.
Fromm convincingly argues that the tensions and ambivalences that characterized the wenshi ziliao project mirrored the contradictions that the CCP needed to reconcile in the early post-Mao transition. In this transformational moment, the Party sought to emphasize national unity over class struggle, without losing sight of the goals of socialism. It sought to balance the narrative of China's victimization by imperialist powers with a celebration of China's long history of integration into the global economy. It sought to coax back into the fold the “experts” (intellectuals, entrepreneurs and others) who had been excluded from participation in the “new China.” It sought to foster local initiative without losing central control. It sought to engage the fractured, exhausted Chinese nation in a process of healing without inviting challenges to its own legitimacy. And it sought to mobilize the Chinese public into a “patriotic united front” while containing the potentially disruptive forces such mobilization could unleash.
As Fromm shows in chapter one, the Party turned to wenshi ziliao as a means of achieving this multifaceted balancing act. The unit tasked with supervising the project was the People's Political Consultative Conference (PPCC), a Party-affiliated advisory body charged with doing United Front work: gaining the consent of potentially oppositional groups, thus achieving “hegemonic rather than merely coercive control of society” (p. 6). Its members included Party cadres, officers of other political parties and organizations, and representatives from the finance, commerce, education and culture sectors at the local, provincial and national levels.
In chapters two and three, Fromm examines the PPCC's work in Heilongjiang, a borderland whose history of Russian influence, Han Chinese migration, ethnic diversity and quasi-legal commercial activity threatened to lay bare the geographical, narrative and political limits of Party control. Wenshi ziliao editors wove together strands of historical narrative in ways that created space for multiple interpretations of historical events and underscored the Party's centrality to regional history as well as the region's centrality to a Party-centred national history. For example, they managed to represent the banditry endemic to the region in the 1930s as both a sign of the dysfunction of the “old society” and as “an unofficial agent of the borderland's integration into the Chinese nation” (p. 49). They elicited from local elites “authentic” personal narratives that documented the history of Russian colonial aggression while celebrating the courage, tenacity and entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese migrants who profited from the Russian presence.
In chapter four, Fromm shows how the discourse of “seeking truth from facts” enabled PPCC officials to knit together diverse interpretations of the past in ways that could expand the limits of a Party-centred national history. Grafting the idea of “historical science” onto Marxist concepts of “dialectical materialism,” wenshi ziliao editors devised a methodology that allowed for a greater inclusivity of perspectives even as it engendered fierce debate about the ideological significance of past events.
Chapters five, six and seven explore the ambivalences and ironies inherent in wenshi ziliao work. The entire project was overdetermined by the Party's need to secure the loyalty of groups that it had disavowed under Mao. Yet organizers who tried to portray the PPCC as a safe space where local elites, intellectuals and capitalist-roaders could feel valued were hamstrung by lingering mistrust of these groups and by the perceived powerlessness of the PPCC itself. The whole point of the wenshi ziliao project was to educate, mobilize and transform the Chinese people while creating new social networks for the Party; but the diversity of the contents, paired with suspicions about the political loyalties of the individuals who compiled them, led the Party to restrict their distribution. And finally, while a grand vision of nationwide integration and systematization sparked increased cooperation among PPCC branches, negotiations over resources and priorities among local, provincial and national organizers created layers of complexity that “overlapped with, diverged from and reappropriated” a unified national narrative (p. 254).
Fromm ultimately argues that wenshi ziliao project entailed the active accommodation of diversity in multiple dimensions: narrative, social, ideological, administrative. Although this is the heart and the strength of the argument, as a structuring principle of the book, at times it feels repetitive. Other themes could have been explored in greater depth, such as the relationship between wenshi ziliao and the CCP's earlier uses of historical memory for social mobilization or the homology between Heilongjiang as national borderland and the PPCC as a “borderland” between Party and non-Party elements. Finally, the book's subtitle mentions “historical identity,” but it is unclear what analytical work this concept does in the text.
In sum, Martin Fromm has written a nuanced and well-researched book showing how the post-Mao state used oral history projects to create space within which multiple ideologies, perspectives and interests could be carefully “accommodated, rearranged, and ultimately reconciled to each other” (p. 12). This commitment to reconciling, rather than razing, diversity served the Party well in its bid to re-establish legitimacy in the 1980s.
