Cultural revolution and collective memory: The case of five intellectuals

Abstract

Nearly two decades after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (CR) officially came to an end, there emerged in the PRC a wave of autobiographical memoirs of the period written by Chinese intellectuals. This dissertation studies five such memoirs to examine how they vie for space in collective memory with the dominant state narrative. The focus here is upon the underlying debate on CR a??historya?? and to what extent these memoirs are able to act as counter-narratives. The research demonstrates that while these memoirs act as partners with the state narrative in the negation of CR, the relationship is far more complex when it comes to CR experience. The study considers motives and agendas of each representation to understand how either side constructs its own version of the usable past, and how this contrasts with the other.