Resource and Resonance: Transformation of Official Memory in Post-Socialist China

• In Event: 40411 - Troubling Pasts: Challenges of History and Commemoration

Abstract

How do certain political actors like states transform their narratives of the past and shape collective memories over time? Beyond ongoing political environment, political goals, and intrinsic meaning of historical events, I focus on cultural constrains for political actors to transform existing collective memories. Using official newspapers and other public records with official backgrounds, I trace the transformation of official memory of the Third Front Construction (TFC), a controversial but less well-known industrial project undertaken by Mao’s China, by the ruling Chinese Communist Party. I find that even though the Chinese state has more freedom to arbitrarily transform the memory of TFC given its authoritarian rule and TFC’s distance to the public, it is still constrained by resonance between previous memories and present political culture and (2) new cultural resources for memory-making available at present. I identify three models of memory transformation for different combination of resonance and resource: reinterpretation, retrofitting, and downplaying. This article offers a new model to study the cultural mechanism in memory transformation and shed light on the recent rise of transitional justice memory and countermemory.

Author

• Zheng Zhang, University of Wisconsin-Madison