Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era

Sinotheory

by Jie Li

In Utopian Ruins Jie Li traces the creation, preservation, and elision of memories about China's Mao era by envisioning a virtual museum that reckons with both its utopian yearnings and its cataclysmic reverberations. Li proposes a critical framework for understanding the documentation and transmission of the socialist past that mediates between nostalgia and trauma, anticipation and retrospection, propaganda and testimony. Assembling each chapter like a memorial exhibit, Li explores how corporeal traces, archival documents, camera images, and material relics serve as commemorative media. Prison writings and police files reveal the infrastructure of state surveillance and testify to revolutionary ideals and violence, victimhood and complicity. Photojournalism from the Great Leap Forward and documentaries from the Cultural Revolution promoted faith in communist miracles while excluding darker realities, whereas Mao memorabilia collections, factory ruins, and memorials at trauma sites remind audiences of the Chinese Revolution's unrealized dreams and staggering losses.

Genres: History, China, Academic

384 pages, Hardcover

Published December 4, 2020

Reviews

[Depayss · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shows the sheer amount of intellectuals whose voices are buried and suppressed: take Lin Zhao, for example, who is ridiculed and humiliated in the contemporary Chinese internet, due to her religious beliefs and close sentiments towards the West, as if the total devotion to one’s country and its Party is what defines one as a human. I’d imagine these intellectuals would be suppressed today, no doubt: look at Wang Bing and his documentaries.

But worse: we still have hope. The Jianchuan Museum Clusters show that there are people who fight like Mao’s guerrillas, trying to preserve the oppressed memories of that red era. I have to go there one day.