Mapping China’s Memories: Contested Histories and National Narratives in Social Media Reviews of post-Mao Films

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Abstract

This article explores how Chinese people make sense of the often-traumatic struggle to create modern China. In a society cautious about explicit political comments, art provides a chance to reflect on sensitive collective experiences. Films by Fifth-Generation filmmakers, for example, capture emotional impact and reconstruct historical memory. Amidst the search for a new post-Mao national narrative, these films created shared spaces where audiences could revisit the past, contest official narratives, and negotiate meanings of history.

We focused on two landmark Fifth-Generation films— Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine and Zhang Yimou’s To Live — to examine how viewers engaged with contested narratives. Drawing on thousands of Douban reviews, China’s leading platform featuring discussion of art, we analyzed how educated, middle-class Chinese interpret the nation’s recent past. Combining semi-supervised seeded Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with close readings of representative reviews, we mapped a wide-ranging national discussion.

Comparing maps derived from both films, we identified distinct schools of thought and their interrelations. Reviewers often portrayed some suffering as deeply tragic, while casting others as symbols of collective endurance. Through these reflections, reviewers voiced perspectives beyond official discourse and engaged in collective meaning-making, joining a broader conversation about modern China’s evolving national narrative. This project contributes to cultural sociology by showing how popular reflections on art can shape shared and divergent understandings of history. It introduces innovative ways to study the role that culture and conversation about culture play in the dynamic debate of a society’s core values and beliefs.

Authors

• Jiayi Zhang, University of California-Los Angeles

• Chandler Rosenberger, Brandeis University