When memory exceeds history: the emerging visual Internet archive on the Cultural Revolution

ABSTRACT

One of the areas that the advent of the Internet has changed most profoundly is the relationship that human beings have with their past. Sources that would once have been barely accessible after a difficult and taxing search are now available to one and all, and can be compared to more traditional texts. The article sets out to show how knowledge of Mao's China and the Cultural Revolution in particular will benefit significantly from the immense pool of recordings and video clips available on the Internet. With the resources afforded by the Web, a brand–new way of linking up words and images, text and visual sources, has become possible, providing the study of history and memory with unexplored tracts of promising terrain. But the importance of this emerging material is not just to do with historical knowledge and methodology. Its main contribution is political: the persecutors and the victims of those years have spoken out, they have deposited their memories online, exercising a faculty that the Cultural Revolution and post–Maoist political institutions had denied them for decades. Through the bottom–up perspective that the Internet provides, the historical protagonists have been able to bear witness in potential perpetuity without needing the researcher's mediation. By speaking directly to the public, the witnesses cease to be merely pieces of the past. They are not just victims or perpetrators who condemn past deeds, but, as the actors who made and endured history, they can turn themselves from passive historical figures into active political agents.

KEYWORDS:

• Archive
• Cultural Revolution
• Internet
• Mao
• memory
• resistance

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Micòl Beseghi, Simone Dossi, Augusto Valeriani, and two anonymous reviewers of Information, Communication & Society for their several helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The connection between proliferating digital information and the new forms of historical knowledge has been keenly studied for several years. See, for example, Karpf (2012) and Weller (2012).

2 On popular historiography in China see Bonnin (2019).

3 This was very much so with Simon Leys’ book, Les habits neufs du Président Mao. Chronique de la Révolution culturelle (1971).

4 Déclaration du président Giscard d’Estaing. 9 September 1976. http://langlois.blog.lemonde.fr/2014/01/22/la-mort-du-president-mao-vue-la-television-francaise-1976/ (accessed 20 November 2018).

5 The literature on the Cultural Revolution is now huge and very diverse in its claims and goals. See, for example, MacFarquhar and Schoenhals (2006) and Clark (2008).

6 For an insightful extensive review on the historiography of the Cultural Revolution published in mainland China see Bonnin (2007).

7 On the Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution see http://www.cnd.org. On Remembrance see http://prchistory.org/remembrance/. On the Exchange for the Cultural Revolution in Various Regions see https://archive.is/jDa6d.

8 In the famous chapter ‘What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear’, Tocqueville (2000, pp. 661–665) discussed the ‘new features’ despotism could assume. The analogy between the despotism discussed by Tocqueville and Mao’s in China lies in their novelty, though clearly the two phenomena are different.

9 See First Pictures of China’s Roving Communists. Life (25 January 1937), p. 9.

10 See Pernin (2014) on indipendent documentary films as tools to transmit memories.

11 On writing on the Chinese past as an act of political resistance see Béja (2019).

12 On the power of images see Zelizer (1998).

13 We allude, for example, to President Xi Jinping’s Maoist revival and, at the more societal level, to the use of Maoism by a variety of Chinese Marxist student groups in order to denounce the exploitation of workers in both state-owned and multinational firms.

14 On the two different ‘faces’ of the internet as both a technology of liberation and a tool used to control society see Diamond (2010) and Mozorov (2012). For a skeptical view on the democratic potential of the Internet for Chinese social and political life, see Wang (2014) and Sullivan (2014). On the growing constraints on the Internet in China see Repnikova and Fang (2018) and Roberts (2018).

15 Confessions of a Red Guard, 50 years after China's Cultural Revolution. Available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/15/asia/china-cultural-revolution-red-guard-confession/index.html (accessed 29 June 2019).

16 Chinese Cultural Revolution: the boy who denounced his mother. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/mar/27/chinese-cultural-revolution-mother-video (accessed 4 July 2019).

17 Still ashamed of my part in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. BBC News. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXAOTjNheVg (accessed 2 July 2019).

18 In January 1974, the political group around Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, fiercely criticized the documentary for being too aesthetic and hence decadent in content. That attack on the film was a polemical hangover from the X National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party where Jiang Qing and her acolytes stood opposed to the ‘reformist’ group of Zhou Enlai, who had once procured Antonioni his invitation. On the political controversy over Antonioni’s documentary see Leys (2015, p. 518).

19 We are still unsure about the role of Song Binbin in the killing of Bian Zhongyun. Song denies to have participated in the beating, but Wang Youqin, a student of the Girl’s Middle School, accused Song to have played an active role (Weigelin-Schwiedrzik & Jinke, 2016).

20 It can be seen with English subtitles at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBfGc3-InrA or French at http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2c8w29 (accessed 5 September 2019).

21 On Hu Jie’s work see Li (2009) and the documentary The Observer (2018) by the Italian director Rita Andreetti. Hu Jie is also the author of the heart-rending Mother Wang Peiying, which reconstructs the story of a railway worker widow, mother of seven children, who publicly called for Mao’s resignation after the Great Leap Forward disaster. She was initially committed to a psychiatric hospital. Then, after refusing to recant, she was arraigned in a sensational mass trial held at the Workers’ Stadium and executed on 27 January 1970. See http://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/51224/My-Mother-Wang-Peiying (accessed 6 September 2019). For more about the extraordinary filmmaker see Johnson (2015).

22 At present it can be viewed on Youtube in two parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2il-JrCC-2I and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhonmVorwX0 (accessed 2 August 2019). On the life of Lin Zhao see Lian (2018) and Kerlan (2018).

23 44th Anniversary of Lin Zhao's Death, Memorial Activities Allowed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDdiqYDqim8 (accessed 30 August 2019).

24 Chinese Police Cordon Off Grave of Mao-Era Dissident, Detain Dozens of Activists. Radio Free Asia (1 May 2017). Available at: https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/grave-05012017104157.html (accessed 7 July 2019). The way the Chinese authorities have handled the importance that Lin Zhao’s grave has taken on for the Chinese dissident movement would merit a study in its own right. To understand the running battle in China over freedom of expression and communication on the Internet see Henochowicz (2015).

25 The full text of the letter appears as ‘China’s Great Wall of Silence: Dr. Rongfen Wang's Letter to President Hu Jintao’ in the blog Public Occurrences (11 March 2008). Available at: https://publicoccurrenc.blogspot.it/2008/03/chinas-great-wall-of-silence-dr-rongfen.html?m=0 (accessed 5 November 2018). Wang Rongfen looks back over her singular career in an interview with Radio Free Asia, ‘Dear Chairman Mao, Please Think About What You Are Doing’ (16 May 2016). Available at: http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/china-cultrev-05162016173649.html.

26 Wang Wrote to Mao to Quit Youth League. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq1w9SZuzTU (accessed 8 June 2019).

27 Interviewed on the possibility of archival research on the Cultural Revolution, historian Frank Dikötter declared that ‘Over the past five years it has become very, very difficult for professional historians to do anything on that decade. It is as if there is a narrowing of that very little space of freedom and memory that ordinary people had for decades after the death of Chairman Mao’, in Funnell (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mario Tesini

Mario Tesini is Professor of History of Political Thought at the University of Parma. His main areas of research are the French Revolution, French liberalism in the nineteenth century, especially Tocqueville, Gaullisme and Anti-gaullisme in relation to the Algerian conflict, and Italian politics during the Cold War. He has recently edited (with L. Zambernardi) a study on Mao's myth in the western world: Quel che resta di Mao. Apogeo e rimozione di un mito occidentale (Le Monnier 2018).

Lorenzo Zambernardi

Lorenzo Zambernardi is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna. His research has been published in the European Journal of International Relations, History of European Ideas, International Political Sociology, International Relations, Political Studies Review, Review of International Studies, and The Washington Quarterly. He has recently edited (with M. Tesini) a volume on Mao's myth in the western world: Quel che resta di Mao. Apogeo e rimozione di un mito occidentale (Le Monnier 2018).