Introduction
"A beast that lurks in the shadows": The paradox of history in modern China
China's fraught relationship with its past is based on two underlying tenets. The first is the cultural sense of pride of 5,000 years of culture (五千年的文化), as represented by Xi Jinping’s promotion of the Chinese dream (中国梦), which is based on the premise that China’s future success depends on the renewal of its long legacy. The glorification of its imperial legacy is complicated by the phenomenon that accounts of events in relatively recent history, such the Great Famine (三年灾难, 1958–1961) and the June 4 Tiananmen Square Massacre (六四事件, 1989), have been suppressed or manipulated by the official government. In Ian Johnson’s “The Presence of the Past–Coda,” Johnson asks, “What eats at a country, or at a people, or a civilization, so much that it remains profoundly uncomfortable with its history?” (303). While Johnson’s focus is on physical places in China, contemporary writers such as Yan Lianke and Yu Hua (read “China’s Struggle to Forget,” below) have similarly remarked on the ways in which memory gets obliterated or sanitized in the present day.
This course explores the ways in which mainland Chinese filmmakers and writers use innovative narrative modes to address issues of memory and trauma in a setting where official history is carefully regulated. Questions we will explore include: How do contemporary Chinese writers and filmmakers draw from world popular culture in their work? What is the relationship between these interpretations of history and official versions of history? What are the strengths and limitations of these new media forms, and who is their intended audience? How are these works representative of their postsocialist setting in contemporary China, and what is their perceived potential use for future generations?
Postpolitics and Postsocialism
In 1997, Chen Xiaoming wrote about the “mysterious” transformation of the role of politics in contemporary Chinese film, moving from the blatantly ideological films of the socialist period to the Fifth Generation films by Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, which had to appeal in the global market to an increasingly global audience’s expectations based on the Western cultural imaginary about China. Using the term “postpolitics,” Chen argues that in contemporary Chinese film, “everything is political and nothing is political at once and the same time. For politics is everywhere, and yet it subverts itself at any moment” (18–19).
The concept of postsocialism is another useful way of understanding the sociocultural context of post-1990s mainland China. Deng Xiaoping’s term “socialism with Chinese characteristics” has greatly impacted the relationship between consumer capitalism and forms of cultural production. Paul Pickowicz explains that the postsocialist condition is one in which people recognize that “popular faith in socialism has vanished, but the economic, political, and cultural legacies of the traditional socialist era continue to have a profound influence on daily social life” (“On the Eve of Tiananmen: Huang Jianxin and the Notion of Postsocialism,” China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation, and Controversy, 277). Together, these two “post” terms suggest that the contemporary cultural sphere shares more similarities and continuities with the historical events of China’s recent past than one may initially imagine.
