This is a smart, well-edited book that bears rereading. It maps out the politics and cultural forms of collective memory in contemporary China. Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang have used their experience editing previous volumes to hammer this one into an unusually coherent and informative set of essays on the public role of memories about China's socialist revolution. In the process, these twelve substantive essays introduce the workings of social memory among various groups—from farmers to rural women, to workers and zhiqing (the sent-down youth of the Cultural Revolution), to the denizens of that wild and troubling “space,” the Internet. Several of these essays also deal with new forms of social remembering, including virtual museums, digital archives, and online communities, as well as traditional museums, ghost stories, major commercial films, and public demonstrations.

The book opens with an arresting claim: “As people grope for moral and cognitive frameworks to understand, assess, and sometimes resist these momentous changes [of reform China] in their lives, memories of the revolution thrive” (p. 1). Collective memories are “part of culture's meaning-making apparatus” (p. 2), and this book sets out to make sense of the meanings of the socialist revolution put forward by various groups in China today and what these tell us about contemporary China. The editors divide the book into two sections: the politics of memory and the cultural forms (poetics) of memory. Their introduction is an analytical map to the semiotics and cultural systems of memory. They distinguish three kinds of memory—nostalgic, traumatic, and critical—that interact with power in a rich but describable matrix of contention over interpretations (especially between official history and social memory), the appropriation of these interpretations for political action, and the formation of political subjects through remembering and forgetting. That might seem like a mouthful of claims, but they are convincingly illustrated in the empirical chapters. In addition to this politics of memory, the editors draw our attention to the mechanisms of social memory—the genres (film as a mnemonic genre, ghost stories, petition letters, and even the national anthem, “The March of the Volunteers”), sites, and media of memory (museums of the War of Resistance, a photo exhibition of zhiqing experiences, some wild Internet sites).

Importantly for our understanding of contemporary China, the editors stress—and the chapters illuminate—the thesis that “cultural resources both facilitate and limit the memory practices of the Chinese revolution” (p. 19). Collectively, these studies show that social memory, which is so often juxtaposed with political power, is, in fact, much more complex, heterogeneous, and fragmented; the relationship between social memory and elite discourse (and not just the party line, but also the elite intellectuals who write on these topics) is deeply ambivalent. The significance of these models comes out in the empirical studies. We meet rural women making sense of their suffering and remembering the good, as well as the bad, of the Great Leap (in regard to gender roles), Mao's rule, and even the role of Jiang Qing. Indeed, memories of the Leap figure largely: in Erik Mueggler's account of ghost stories in an Yi village that deal with the great famine, and in Kimberly Manning's conversations with rural women in a Henan village who remember the female empowerment, as well as the cleavages of relative privilege among different villagers, in the Leap. Gail Hershatter brings in the voice of rural women from villages in central and south Shaanxi in her account of the politics of memory of “the long 1950s” (1949–61).

Elsewhere, Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan show the resentments of state-owned enterprise workers through their memories of their factory and their belief that the state owes them an honorable retirement. Ching Kwan Lee gives an account of what socialism means to a range of workers today as they use Mao portraits in street demonstrations and wax nostalgic over conditions in the past. David Davies introduces the carefully framed but poignant memories of zhiqing in a photo exhibition that was mounted in a Shanghai shopping mall in December 1998. Ban Wang unpacks the meanings in Jia Zhangke's “epic” film Platform (2000), comparing it usefully to better-known films in order to highlight the staging of memory and the yearning for an authentic connection to the collective. Robert Chi traces the life of “The March of the Volunteers” from movie theme song to China's national anthem, while Kirk Denton investigates the public presentation of the memory of Japanese imperialism in four important museums. Finally, Guobin Yang provides a fascinating tour of the realm of virtual memory in Sinaphone cyberspace—from Chinese Communist Party Web sites to virtual museums of the Cultural Revolution, to blogs for zhiqing, to a plethora of Mao sites.

The consistently high quality of these articles is worth remarking on: these are sound studies, drawing on substantial empirical research, cast and edited to address a theme of key significance efficiently. They are a fitting successor to Rubie Watson's fine collection on the political role of memory in late and postsocialist societies (Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism [Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1994]). This collection of essays will not only interest the scholar but also engage the student.