Manufactured Amnesia: “The World Turned Upside Down” by Yang Jisheng

A “struggle session” against rival factions, Beijing, 1965

I’ve seen amnesia created, with my own eyes. No one in China under age 40 knows what happened In Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989. No one over forty who was in Beijing will choose to remember it. No one of any age outside of Beijing will even know about it.  Pretty much the same with the Gang of Four, who I actually studied, in Chinese, back in 1976, just after they’d been arrested. Nowadays nothing, because to remember them, even as the villains they were, raises uncomfortable questions account the complicity of the communist party. 

So, a manufactured national amnesia. Including the big one, the Great Leap Forward, instigated by Mao Tse-tung, which killed fifty million. Forgotten. Even as we, outside, might recall that that’s ten times the number of Jews Hitler killed. 

Xi Jinping is no fan of the Cultural Revolution. His father Xi Zhongxun, was purged by Mao and Jinping exiled to the countryside as a teenager. But he styles himself after Mao, nonetheless, as dictators emulate dictators. It’s the thing. And Xi, son, keeps on ramming those uncomfortable historical happenings down the Great Memory Hole of China.

Brave historians like Yang Jisheng, keep up the struggle to remember. The Atlantic’s latest edition has a book review of some of these, “China’s Rebel Historians”.

The article has links to photos of Tiananmen Square, then and now. Each year it’s been remembered here in Hong Kong. But I wonder if it will be so this year.* Or will it be classified as subversion under the new NSL, and banned? I fear the latter. And the process of forgetting the past will go in here as well, part of the sinicisation of Hong Kong. 

Snip:

In china, history long occupied a quasi-religious status. During imperial times, dating back thousands of years and enduring until the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, historians’ dedication to recording the truth was viewed as a check against wrongdoing by the emperor. Rulers, though forbidden from interfering, of course tried.

So have their successors. Among the most intent on harnessing history for political gain are the current leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. They routinely scrub Chinese-language scholarly books, journals, and textbooks of anything that might undermine their own legitimacy—including anything that tarnishes Mao Zedong, the founding father of the party. The effort, no small task, has not gone unchallenged. A web of amateur historians has been collecting documents and eyewitness testimony from the seven decades that have elapsed since the establishment of modern China in 1949. Guo Jian, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater who has translated some of their findings, describes the tenacious researchers as “the inheritors of China’s great legacy,” dedicated to “preserving memory against repression and amnesia.’’. [Read on…]

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*ADDED (17/6/24): June 4th was was not Remembered, here in Hong Kong, in 2021 and has not been since. It’s being Memory Holed.