Memory Politics in China’s Northeast Borderland: Local and Regional Processes of Producing Post-Mao Nationalism

• In Event: Border Anxiety, Border Ambiguity: Nation and Empire Building in the Borderlands of East Asia

Abstract

In the early 1980s the county, city, and provincial levels of the party-state in China’s northeast borderland with Russia mobilized teams of investigators to conduct interviews and collect materials for a state-sponsored oral history project. This project, known as the wenshi ziliao, was part of a nation-wide campaign to bring about political reconciliation and social healing in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution through the production of history based in first-hand testimony. My conference paper draws upon new research materials gathered from local and provincial archives in the northeast province of Heilongjiang as well as interviews that I conducted with surviving participants to investigate the political processes and social interactions that constituted this historical engineering project. It examines the entanglement of local, regional, and national historical identities in the construction of new post-Mao economic and political identities. Analysis of committee reports and editors’ self-reflections sheds light on the policies, motivations and methodologies that shaped the process of interviewing, organizing, and editing wenshi ziliao materials, tying local practices of state-sponsored oral history in the northeast borderland to broader political and economic concerns of the post-Mao nation-state. Policies and practices of wenshi ziliao historical production shaped memories and representations of the borderland past in terms of commercial expansion, ethnic conflict, and wild frontier in ways that addressed the competing agendas of political and social re-invention and reconciliation in 1980s China. Based on this analysis, I argue that the historical reconstruction of the northeast borderland as an ambiguous political space was critical to the production of a new post-Mao nationalist ideology.

Author

• Martin Fromm, Worcester State University