Erasure and Renewal in (Post)Socialist China: My Mother's Long Journey

• In Event: Toward Decolonizing Childhood: Researching Memories of Everyday Life in (Post)Socialist Societies

Abstract

In Western academic literature on China, the Cultural Revolution is largely interpreted as rupture and erasure. That is, an era of erroneous political decision-making, wasted human lives, and what Agamben (2005) calls “the state of exception” with horrific politicization of life and ideological paranoia. However, there are other voices – albeit minor ones – that do not contradict the dominant narrative yet offer multilayered hues to the visions of the past via particular historical consciousness informed by biographical accounts. Etched on the same cultural and political template are themes of erasure and ruin, as well as signs of reparation and renewal. Through autoethnographic accounts of memories and lived experiences, this paper explores memories of youth and the absent presence of schooling during my Mother’s long journey in China’s Cultural Revolution and the present market reform to examine the fraught relations between the party-state and its youth, between education and political socialization, between public values and authoritarian limits that continue to tug the social fabric of today’s China.

This article draws from elements in memory studies, ethnography, and life history - genres that coexist with converging and diverging potentiality, as much as China’s (post)socialist conditions entail competing and complementary elements. While memory serves as a cultural trope of everyday consciousness, its amorphous, dynamic meanings challenge the essentialist stance in conceiving objectivity in social science research (Keightley, 2010). Memory charts an “unofficial” history and provides micro-scale sense-making to illuminate social, political and educational experiences. Memory study challenges the claims of fixed historical truths, and mobilizes alternative, marginalized accounts to shed light on the dynamics of power linking past, present, and future. The narratives are derived from three sources: focused oral testimonials, physical artifacts, and memorabilia. Revisiting the past through listening again and again echoes of family conversations and oral testimonials, consulting old photographs, and rekindling memories, I come to see Mother’s dilemmas and the eccentricities of an era in a different light. Where I would expect melancholy there was relief; where I anticipated great displeasure, hope surfaced; where I would read as painful, Mother appeared nostalgic.

There is no single story about China as theories of Western politicians would have predicted. As demonstrated in this paper, during both ideological turbulence and present-day market reform, the state works as a powerful pedagogical node against which people make sense of knowledge, power, and social change and imagine their own place in the midst of it. Meanwhile for ordinary people like mother who became subjects of social experiments, life is nonetheless a performative space of self-making where one receives whatever comes and gropes to make better meanings out of it. Mother’s narratives highlight the shifting modalities of power of the Chinese pedagogical state and illustrate that (post)socialist conditions are mediated by the continual assertion of political authority alongside people’s creative agency.

Author

• Jinting Wu, University at Buffalo - SUNY