Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

2 Constructing history:
memories, values and
identity
Introduction: speech act of identification
Ever since the late 1980s, memoirs, autobiographies and biographies
have overwhelmingly stigmatized at the Cultural Revolution as ten
years of chaos, calamities or even holocaust. In this influx of remembering,
in contemporary China the Chinese appear to have awoken
from a nightmare after which justice is sought, wounds are to be
healed, the bad and evil are condemned, and the good and reasonable
are endued with power and glory. In this enterprise of remembering,
the past memories have a moral as well as a truth claim. But can ten
years’ lived experience during the Cultural Revolution years be
reduced to a bad dream? What were so many millions of intelligent
and reasonable Chinese thinking and doing in these years?
An answer that is constantly on offer is that the Chinese were either
brutally suppressed and/or brainwashed by a Communist regime led
by a power-hungry dictator. In contrast to this cold war interpretation,
and based on the assumption that the Chinese were no less reasonable
then and no less brainwashed now, this chapter argues that the moral
and truth claims of this remembering of the Cultural Revolution are
necessarily constructions. Inspired by Ricoeur’s ideas of memories,
forgetfulness and identity, I propose that memory is not a thing that is
recalled, but an act of identity. According to what Ricoeur calls ‘narrative
identity’, to tell a story of one’s life is to make sense of it (Popkin
2005). But one needs a conceptual framework to organize the story so
that sense can be made of. It is argued in this chapter that the conceptual
framework in post-Mao China that organizes Chinese memories is
dominantly the contemporary version of qimeng (Enlightenment), that
is, liberal democracy and market capitalism. According to this conceptual
framework, anything that happens in China, past or present, is
only transitional until and unless China becomes part of the West in its
political system and cultural values.
Memories are not only about the past, but also constitute a form of
knowledge. The narrative of atrocity of the Cultural Revolution is not
just a retelling of past experience but also a speech act of political identity.
In the early stage of the development of this narrative, to retell
Cultural Revolution atrocities was to rehearse the political speech act
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