For scholars of modern Chinese history, the genre of historical sources known collectively as wenshi ziliao is incredibly alluring. Made up of as they are of locally compiled oral histories, memoirs, and rich, interview-based articles, wenshi ziliao compilations are widely available and shine a clear highly readable light on local events and historical figures (full disclosure: I have two volumes on my desk as we speak). In his new book, Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China, Martin T. Fromm offers a much-needed critical window onto the origins of these sources, and in doing so reveals important insights into the construction of history and memory in Post-Mao China.
Borderland Memories is made up of seven thematically organized chapters and is based on an impressive array of sources collected from city and county-level archives in China's northeastern province of Heilongjiang. At the heart of the book is Fromm's argument that, beginning in the 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to navigate the transition to the Post Mao “Reform and Opening” period by constructing a new, more inclusive perspective on Chinese history, one that diverged from the Mao-era focus on class struggle and the inexorable power of revolution. The new project, he argues, was part of a systematic effort to “re-institutionalize the memory of the past” (27). As a result, beginning in the 1980s, wenshi ziliao editors began collecting the life stories of a wide and motley array of non-party local figures, including businessmen, soldiers, and bandits, who had been largely written out of the official party history. Fromm argues that wenshi ziliao editors, working with a broad array of researchers, interviewers, and compilers sought “political reconciliation and reconsolidation for the purpose of unified Party-led development” (6–7).
The wenshi ziliao project was the flagship project of the newly resurgent People's Political Consultative Congress (PPCC) in the 1980s. And Borderland Memories offers a unique perspective on the long-overlooked organization. Originally founded in the 1940s as part of a larger effort to cement a “united front” between CCP members and non-party members, the PPCC faded to inconsequence in the 1960s as the party focused its energies not on inclusivity, but on revolutionary purity. The institution was resurrected in the 1980s, to draw in intellectuals and other groups marginalized in the Maoist political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. Spearheaded by the PPCC, the wenshi ziliao project was an attempt to give these marginalized groups an opportunity to reveal their own role and integrate their own stories into a broader, China-centered, rather than party-centered historical narrative. The insights offered by Fromm are an important perspective on the rejuvenation of post-Mao CCP united front operations, and they reveal how the larger Reform and Opening shift was also a “reform” of party histories and “opening” of party memories. Wenshi ziliao, as Fromm argues, were part of a post-Mao “restorative approach to justice that highlighted multifaceted complexity” (15).
Fromm's focus on the wenshi ziliao project offers insight into important questions about memory, justice, and nationalism in the 1980s that have only begun to be explored by historians. Beyond these questions, Fromm also seeks to offer a new perspective on the integration of Chinese border histories into a larger party history, which Fromm engages through his focus on wenshi ziliao collection efforts in far northern Manchuria. The region was powerfully shaped by the early twentieth-century interactions between the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union, the Japanese Empire, and the Chinese state. Fromm argues that the complexities in this engagement meant that many residents of this borderland had life stories that did not fit easily into party-centered narratives. The wenshi ziliao project then, in its effort to put forward a more inclusive perspective on China's history, gave many of the residents in border regions an opportunity to link their own stories to the new, more inclusive party history being shaped in the 1980s. Once marginalized for their connections to imperial powers, or for their role as businessmen or cross-border traders, China's turn toward market reforms and global markets allowed these once marginal figures to recast themselves as the green shoots of an economically dynamic, expanding, and indeed resurgent China.
The difficult choices faced by editors and compilers as they sought to navigate the shifting terrain of the 1980s were not restricted to those grappling with the complexities of China's border regions. Indeed, the negotiations detailed by Fromm over who belongs and who does not in these new histories was a question faced by historians everywhere in China in the 1980s. In the end, Borderland Memories makes a contribution less to our understanding of the formation of borderlands in the 1980s than to the larger formation of memory and history in the post Mao era. But this is no small contribution. Indeed, Fromm's deep and nuanced inquiry into memory making and the formation of a new, post-Mao historical orthodoxy can be applied kaleidoscopically to every province, county, and village in the People's Republic. The resonance of this process continued to shape party histories in the 1980s and 1990s. And the connection that Fromm reveals between party leaders and local historians offers insights into how we might be able to understand how party histories have continued to evolve in the Xi Jinping period.
