Lingchei Chen has used the phrase “leap backward” in the title of her new book on historical forgetting in contemporary China. It is an obvious play on Mao Zedong's “leap forward,” but it is also more than that. It raises the questions: why do we need to “leap”? Over what are we leaping?

Chen shows, and anyone who teaches students from the PRC well knows, that to reach the reality of the Mao disasters of the 1950s and 1960s one needs to leap over great mounds of lies, distortions and ignorance that PRC “publicity” officials have placed between the people of today and the events of 60 years ago. Youngsters in China today know nothing of the Anti-rightist Movement, the Great Leap famine and the Cultural Revolution – or, if pressed, turn out to sort-of know something, but also to know they are not supposed to talk about it in public. In their formal instruction, the enormous disaster of 1959–62 has always been “three years of difficulty”; the Cultural Revolution, that dagger to the heart of Chinese moral values, in the most recent textbooks has been “a period of experimentation” (tansuo shiqi). Chen argues that the resulting fraudulent fog undermines not just a sense of history but people's senses of identity.

In other societies that experienced catastrophe during the 20th century, writers sometimes played important roles in efforts to recover normalcy, or at least to look squarely at what happened. Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel did this for the Holocaust, Solzhenitsyn for the Gulag, Ōe Kenzaburō for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nadine Gordimer for apartheid – and of course there were other writers for each of these cases, as well as other important cases. But what about China? Why has China been relatively silent? Chen rightly focuses on the great famine as the apex of the Mao disasters and cites Yang Jisheng's Tombstone, which provides an ocean of details on it, as “my primary text” (p. 19). Yang has done a tremendous service but still is no match for Levi or Solzhenitsyn in literary power. Chen also mentions Zhang Xianliang, whose labour-camp novels are perhaps as close as China comes to world standards in disaster-recovery literature, but China's overall showing remains weak. One important reason, of course, is that the ruling regime today continues to trace its legitimacy to Mao, and the “mistake” of exposing Mao's immense cruelties still carries a fearsome price tag.

A parallel question is why Westerners who study China have also been relatively quiet. Louisa Lim's The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited is explicitly about memory, and Geremie Barmé's In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture says much about it as well. But these fine books focus mainly on the Deng years, for which Mao is the dragon in the shadows. On square looks at the Mao disasters themselves, the China field has no book, for example, to set beside John Treat's Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb.

Lingchei Chen would not claim that her book fills this gap at once, but she does courageously dive in. Noting that the analytic triangle of perpetrator–victim–bystander has become standard in Holocaust studies, she also adopts it. “Scar literature” (1977–80) featured clear victims and perpetrators. Victims shouted “It's their fault!!” while pointing at perpetrators who were the Gang of Four and their followers. Later, in Chen's analysis, writers like Yu Hua and Can Xue drew more sensitive attention to the psychologies of victims and eventually to the discovery that the distinction between perpetrator and victim is not always so clear. Chen quotes a clinical psychologist named Steven Baum who, echoing Hannah Arendt's famous phrase “the banality of evil,” writes that “most evil is the product of rather ordinary people caught up in unusual circumstances” (p. 67). And this must have been the case in Mao's China. How could a single group of “four” have victimized nearly a billion? A tendency to do evil must have got into everyone – or, at least, into a great many.

Chen is critical of writers who recognize that the madness was pandemic but find excuses for themselves. Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, claims to have been young, naïve and therefore blameless for the Mao mayhem, but Chen finds her plea “incongruent” with her “persona in the book” (p. 210). Liang Xiaosheng, author of Confessions of a Red Guard, bluntly states that although he confesses, “I do not repent” (p. 226). Chen partially excuses him because he explains that his reason for non-repentance is to rebut the view that Red Guards alone were responsible for the disaster. It would fall to Ba Jin, Gao Xiaosheng and others to confess and repent at once.

Chen is alert to ways in which memory can be manipulated. She sees Anchee Min's Red Azalea, like Chang's Wild Swans, as suffering from too much self-pity. Were you really such complete victims? In depicting yourselves as such, are you not over-simplifying history? But later, when a book called Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era (edited by Zhong Xueping, Wang Zheng and Bai Di) claimed that Anchee Min and Jung Chang are wrong because growing up in China was “just as ordinary as anywhere else” (p. 214), Chen again sees a danger in pre-conceived conclusions. “What gets lost in this overcorrection?” she wonders (p. 216).

She uses the wonderful phrase “memory lite” to refer to superficial modes of memory that include everything from nostalgia among sent-down youth for the good old days in the countryside to the “engineered nostalgia” pushed by the state. Memory lite has also become a commercial commodity that “exoticizes and trivializes the experiences of the Cultural Revolution” (p. 222). Chen goes on to write that:

Memory lite omits much, but even in serious retrospections Chen worries about what is omitted. She devotes more than 30 respectful pages to Yan Lianke's Four Books, unpacking its Christian and other allegories, but in the process criticizes Yan several times for “excluding peasants” (p. 160), who were the “real human beings” (p. 164) and were “brutally victimized” (p. 165). If Chen makes that criticism, though, one can only wonder why she so often brings in Western “theory” that is at least as far abstracted from real human beings (and not as coherent) as Yan's allegories are. To take just one example, she quotes Paul Ricœur:

The reader need not fear that I have taken these words out of context. In context they are as Delphic. Their real import seems to be to say, “I, too, am a member of the modern Chinese literature field as it exists today.” Actually, though, Chen's reasoning is fine, and her book would be stronger, without such tags.

“Post-memory” is another of the book's thought-provoking topics. Chen uses it to mean memories in the minds of the descendants of victims, perpetrators, or bystanders of atrocity. When trauma is severe, second-generation memory can fuse with first-hand memory until the two are almost equally haunting. Iris Chang was not yet born when the Nanjing massacre happened, but after she heard about it from her grandmother, studied it at length, and wrote The Rape of Nanking, she so embraced its horror that eventually (along with other factors) it drove her to suicide. But if victimhood can be, in a sense, inherited, can “perpetratorhood” be as well? Should Japanese born after the war bear a personal responsibility to apologize to Chinese and Korean people? Similar questions can be asked in many contexts, of course. Post-memory is a rich intellectual field.

The theme of “never again” runs through Chen's book. One the most oft-cited reasons for remembering disasters, not only in China but elsewhere, is to prevent recurrence. During China's “scar” years in the late 1970s, Chinese officials and intellectuals were virtually unanimous in saying that nothing like the Cultural Revolution could ever happen again. Today, with the CCP again stoking nationalism, touting a brave new world, washing the minds of youth, and finding very considerable success in all these endeavours, is another paroxysm really so unthinkable? It is a question to bear in mind as one reads Chen's book.