China’s National Amnesia
Beijing’s selective memory is a political strategy.
APRIL 23, 2024
Forgetting & Amnesia
I once wrote an essay titled “National Amnesia,” in which I recounted how, while in Hong Kong in March of 2012, I met Swedish Sinologist Torbjörn Lodén, who told me how, when he was teaching at the City College of Hong Kong, he once asked his class of more than forty students from China, all of whom were born in the 1980s, “Have any of you heard of June Fourth, Liu Binyan, or Fang Lizhi?” However, the students simply gazed at one another in silence. In response to this story, I told Lodén about another Hong Kong professor who once asked her Chinese students, “Did you know that between thirty and forty million people starved to death during the so-called Three Years of Natural Disaster?” Her students were dumbfounded, reacting as though she had suddenly started to invent Chinese history from scratch to attack the students’ rising Chinese nation.
When we had this conversation, Professor Lodén and I were sitting in a quiet Vietnamese restaurant, and after recounting our respective anecdotes, we silently gazed at each other for a long time. From that point on, an issue that people have long privately recognized but never openly discussed became wedged in my brain — this being the problem of national amnesia. I would periodically remember things or dimly hear the blood flowing through my body, whereupon issues relating to national amnesia would gallop through my veins like a herd of horses, arriving at my plaza of self-reproach.
In contemporary China, amnesia inevitably overpowers memory, just as falsity overcomes truth and fabrication becomes the interface that links history and logic.
Is it not the case that those Chinese born in the 1980s and 1990s — and who now are in their twenties and thirties — have truly become a generation without memory? Who is it that forced them to forget? How were they made to forget? What responsibility do those of us who are older, and who still retain our memories, have for this younger generation?
Upon reflecting for a while on these issues, I realized that this kind of forgetting could be more accurately called a form of amnesia. This is because the act of forgetting simply means that the past has been left out of one’s memory, whereas amnesia connotes a process of selectively excising specific facets of reality or history, combined with the simultaneous construction of new memories. Indeed, it is precisely through this amnesiac condition that our nation has managed to leave an entire new generation in what would appear to be a persistent vegetative state. History and reality, the past and the present, are in the process of being actively forgotten — thoroughly erased from the memories of an entire generation. Memory and amnesia, truth and forgetting — these words and phrases are constantly colliding inside our heads. In the past, we believed that history and collective memory would ultimately win out over any short-term memory loss, thereby allowing one to return to an intuitive truth. However, the reality is precisely the opposite. In contemporary China, amnesia inevitably overpowers memory, just as falsity overcomes truth and fabrication becomes the interface that links history and logic. Even things that we just witnessed today end up being cast aside, leaving behind only broken shards of reality and fiction embedded within society, life, and people’s brains. And when something unexpected happens tomorrow, these shards will be tossed into a basket of amnesia, which will then be hung in a dark corner out of sight.
Why Are Things Forgotten?
It must be acknowledged that after the birth of our country, in 1949, revolutionary movements swept over this great nation on a nearly daily basis. Revolution creates political power, history, reality, and even memory itself. Meanwhile, memory and what is remembered, together with natural and forced amnesia, all fall under the category of national memory and national amnesia, thereby becoming a kind of revolutionary choice and method that can be systematically implemented. Here we won’t speak of the feudal period, when China was ruled by kings and emperors. Similarly, the Xinhai Revolution that brought down China’s last dynasty is now but a distant memory, and while Sun Yatsen’s name is still well-known today, the pivotal historical events that were associated with him have all been selectively excised from our history books and textbooks. Even the old people who lived through China’s warlord period and the Sino-Japanese War, and who sacrificed on behalf of different parties, armies, and leaders during the civil war and the anti-Japanese War — they have also been selectively forgotten. This process of forgetting is a national strategy.
Later, when one man’s fervor and madness led the entire nation to a frothy state of revolution and construction, the nation initially used mass movements to extend a state of war. After revolution replaced production, there was the 1951 Three Antis Campaign (targeting corruption, waste, and bureaucracy) and the 1953 Five Antis Campaign (targeting graft, tax evasion, theft of state property, theft of economic information, and cheating on government contracts). Looking back now, it is clear that the latter campaign was the most realistic of the countless revolutionary movements that developed in China after 1949. However, because of the revolutionaries’ fervor and the fact that this wartime generation inherited the lesson that “political power comes from the muzzle of a gun,” the campaign was also very popular and far-reaching. Many places were assigned quotas for the number of people who needed to be seized and supervised, and the issue was not whether these places had any revolutionary targets but rather that they had to have these revolutionary targets. These pivotal 1951 and 1953 political campaigns laid the foundation for the disastrous 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign, the mere mention of which still makes Chinese intellectuals quake in fear. The latter event was subsequently removed from everyone’s warehouse of memory, and from that point on people were no longer able to discuss — or even mention — it.
Later developments, including the Great Leap Forward, the Great Iron-Smelting Campaign, the so-called Three Years of Natural Disaster (during which between thirty and forty million people starved to death), and the decade-long Cultural Revolution, were so absurd and tragic that they left the entire world dumbfounded. For this reason, people did not dare, were not able, and were not willing to return to these memories so that their children might have an accurate historical image. After China’s Reform and Opening Up Campaign, there was the war with Vietnam — no one knew exactly how the war started, and regardless of how many soldiers or civilians died in the conflict, no one ever uttered a word about it. Under the 1983 Strike Hard Campaign, the so-called law — which is merely power grinding its teeth — dictated that countless young lovers were designated as hooligans and imprisoned for merely kissing in public, and countless poor people who had stolen out of desperation were executed.
Amnesia is not a special characteristic of everyone’s symptoms and ideology; rather, it is a necessary outcome of a national strategy and a social structure.
Of course, the rest of the world remembers the 1989 June Fourth student movement as though it happened just yesterday, and even after the gunshots, bloodshed, and deaths became mere echoes, the details of the event remain etched in the world’s collective memory. However, in the country where this event occurred, everyone is wrapped up in the rapid growth of the nation’s economy and power, and consequently they have become estranged from the event itself and have even begun to forget that it ever happened. For many who witnessed the crackdown, the memories have come to resemble ethereal, otherworldly dreams. As for the youths who participated in the protests, regardless of whether they subsequently achieved success in life, they all now summarize their experience in one word: “Stupid!” With this, they mock their own earlier behavior and satisfy the demand for amnesia, having already cut off and covered up their individual fate, their collective memory, and their national memory.
What else? There is also everything that is happening today, including the rural HIV/AIDS epidemic; the 2007 Shaanxi Black Brick Kiln incident; multiple gas explosions; tainted dumplings, milk powder, eggs, and seafood; illegally recycled cooking oil; and fruits and vegetables contaminated by carcinogenic additives. There are also the compulsory abortions that were performed under the one-child policy, the ubiquitous forced demolitions throughout today’s cities and countryside, as well as the unethical and illegal persecution of people peacefully petitioning for redress. All these negative incidents with the potential to harm the nation’s image and power become reduced to smoke through a system of compulsory amnesia. Following a process of censorship and excision from all newspapers, magazines, television, the internet, and other sites that might contain concrete memories, the objectives of collective amnesia have been attained.
Amnesia is not a special characteristic of everyone’s symptoms and ideology; rather, it is a necessary outcome of a national strategy and a social structure. Its most effective vector is through regulations and other methods covering an ideological restriction of speech and the use of power to cut off all conduits through which memory can be preserved — including history books, textbooks, literary works, and other forms of cultural expression. The former Peking University professor Zhang Zhongxing once remarked, “If we can’t speak, we can always remain silent. Even if we don’t know what to say, we nevertheless always know what not to say.” Late in life, Professor Fei Xiaotong went to visit Yang Jiang, the wife of the author Qian Zhongshu, and as Fei Xiaotong was leaving the couple’s home, Yang Jiang remarked, “You are old now, so you shouldn’t keep trying to ‘buck the wind.’” Today, this remark might sound like a mere pleasantry, but at the time it also connoted the deep bitterness of the Chinese intellectuals’ silence. Sometimes we claim that “silence is a form of voiceless resistance,” although in reality silence is simply silence. The same way that if you don’t speak for a long time, you may become mute, if you remain silent for a long time, acquiescent silence may similarly become part of your identity and one of the pernicious measures by which the nation enforces its collective amnesia — as the nation becoming a facilitator of those who subject you to obligatory amnesia.
Once an entire people falls silent, the nation itself may also lose its memory. This is not specific to any particular nation, but rather it applies to all nations operating under a dictatorship or centralized state power, or those that find themselves in a period of centralized power, and will use these sorts of strictures to suppress speech. First, the state will silence intellectuals, who tend to have good recall, and will strip them of their memories. Next, as the state gradually consolidates its power, it will extend this amnesiatic state to the general population. Once the next generation knows nothing about this process, this kind of forced amnesia will be able to declare victory, and history will have been completely rewritten.
Ways of Forgetting
Compulsory amnesia may be viewed as a form of rape. The rapist’s violence does not have any new significance — unlike an animal staking out its territory that it needs to survive. Meanwhile, the reason why power is able — at an ideological level — to subject reality and history to a form of compulsory amnesia is precisely because power needs to consolidate itself. However, in contemporary China compulsory amnesia cannot be reduced to issues of nation and power, but rather we must also attend to the intellectuals’ own complicity in this process. Intellectuals will voluntarily sacrifice their memory — and when they finally reach the complete amnesia that power demands, this is where we find the biggest difference between intellectuals in China and in other countries. For instance, during the White Terror period, the Soviet Union attempted to consolidate its power by using a method of compulsory forgetting known as a prison house of language, but the result was the production of many authors like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Anatoly Rybakov. It is not so much that these authors’ works constituted a direct resistance to power but rather that they constituted a form of recovery and treatment of a collective memory. Similarly, Czech author Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting discusses the harm and deprivation that power had on his country, while the Hungarian author Ágota Kristóf ’s Notebook trilogy takes a people’s darkest memories and drags them into the light. We could also cite countless other examples.
The situation in contemporary China, however, is completely different from thirty years ago, when, as in contemporary North Korea, all doors and windows to the outside world were tightly closed. In contemporary China, one window (the economy) is now open to the world while another (politics) remains closed, because of the state’s need to control society and the people. This is where the problem lies. Related to the issue of memory and forgetting, the specificity of the current Chinese-style system of national amnesia can be found in the nation’s half-open and half-closed windows.
First, under a powerful ideological system the partially open window is overseen by ideology. No one can directly observe the state’s ideology, even as the state is constantly observing everything that every intellectual says, writes, or does. Furthermore, because this window can let in some sunlight, the world’s wind and light have no choice but to surge in, thereby allowing people to experience enlightenment and the process of reform and opening up. The law does not have a specific significance with respect to memory and forgetting, and instead it exists in name only. It does not protect freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to publish, or authors’ freedom to imagine, nor does it protect people’s freedom to remember or those people who are unwilling to forget. Instead, all hope rests with our leaders’ enlightenment and morality.
Second, the partially open window has been opened not because of the efforts of intellectuals but rather because of power itself. Because the window has been opened as a result of the enlightenment and charity of certain figures, the people are therefore easily satisfied and display modest demands when it comes to the display of memory and amnesia. Therefore, once this window has been partially opened, people will no longer plead, summon, or struggle with power, attempting to return that other, unopened window to the people. After people who have long been locked in the dark are finally granted a window through which they can receive some sunlight and fresh air, how would they be able to demand that it be opened even wider? As a result, voluntary memories may pass through this half-open window, while compulsory amnesia remains locked behind the closed one. In contemporary China, this is the environment within which writers and intellectuals are willing to write — they express themselves within a space of voluntary memory while remaining silent within a space of compulsory amnesia. For China’s intellectuals, the acceptance of amnesia constitutes a sort of collective compromise — a form of mutual understanding and tacit recognition following the abandonment of collective memories. These intellectuals feel that given that they still have air to breathe today, there is no need to make needless sacrifices for tomorrow. They remember what can be remembered and forget what must be forgotten. In this way they resemble obedient children who are awarded attention and candy for being well-behaved.
Therefore, in choosing between memory and amnesia, talented and ambitious authors and artists often become complicit and silent.
Third, intellectuals’ tacit consent and approval of this amnesiac system derives from our country’s current prosperity. Intellectuals who support this amnesia — be they authors or professors, historians or sociologists — see only what they are meant to see, and they don’t look for anything else; they need only sing the praises of that which they are supposed to and not attempt to describe that which needs to be cast aside and forgotten; they need only apply their imagination to imagine what power, history, and reality demand and not permit the wings of their imagination to take them to regions that must be obscured and forgotten, or into the real sky. If intellectuals do this, they will be given power, honor, and money, but otherwise they will be silenced and even imprisoned (like Liu Xiaobo and all the philosophers, professors, and lawyers who have been designated as suspected provocateurs and arrested because they tried to commemorate June Fourth in the privacy of their own home). In contemporary China, money enjoys an incomparable strength and power, and is capable of sealing people’s lips, drying up the ink in their pen, and making the wings of their literary imagination fly away from reality and conscience. Later, money uses art and the reputation of artists to grandly complete that magnificent reconstruction on the basis of the fictions and illusions resulting from the forgetting of history. In this way, reality is buried, conscience is castrated, and language is gang-raped by power and capital. Meanwhile, the time and history that are being artificially elevated by power are gradually helping complete this process of national forgetting, while at the same time creating a “new history.” This new history then cultivates and nurtures everyone’s habit of forgetting as well as their skepticism toward skepticism itself. Skeptics are always punished, while people who willingly believe lies and fictions, and who do not doubt that beneath the darkness there is a dazzling white background — they can all pocket their rewards.
As a result, this historical project of national amnesia has proven to be a great success.
The compulsory dimensions of this Chinese strategy of national amnesia have many parallels around the world, but its compromising and rewarding dimensions are unique to contemporary China. Thirty years ago, China used force to confront those who were unwilling to forget, but today this prosperous nation openly draws on its immense reserves of capital to use monetary rewards to help make people complicit in their own amnesia. Within literature and the arts, there is not a single national award in China that is sponsored by the people or by an independent organization. Instead, virtually all literature, arts, journalism, and culture prizes are administered by either the Party or the state, and consequently are complicit in this process of collective amnesia. This is not to say that the awards are completely worthless but rather that they permit you to write, create, and imagine only within a constrained area. As long as you remain within this constrained area, you will find success and will be rewarded with fame and accolades.
It must be admitted that the directors and deputy directors of the Chinese Writers’ Association and China’s Literary Federation, together with most of the directors of provincial-level, city-level, and even county-level and district-level writers’ associations, include some of the most talented authors and artists in the nation or in their corresponding provinces, counties, or districts. Within the history, reality, and truth from which they are permitted to select, many authors use a combination of silence and selective speech, and within this area of compulsory amnesia and selective memory, they display their talented creativity and create a “good work” that is recognized by power, which invites those who have lost their memories to project a darkness within which it is impossible to see the truth, while inviting those who retain their memories to project a light and give accolades.
Meanwhile, those who do forget are able gain wealth, power, and prestige, and can even use their amnesia to obtain an enticing object of exchange from the state.
It is for this reason that these authors and artists become the directors and deputy directors of their corresponding writers’ associations and literary federations. Their position represents not only a kind of power but also their achievement, glory, and symbolism in the path of artistic creation that they choose to pursue. Therefore, in choosing between memory and amnesia, talented and ambitious authors and artists often become complicit and silent. They remember what they need to remember and forget what they are told to forget — and in this way they help implement a process of selective memory. At most, they can wander along the margins of a history that needs to be suppressed and through the outskirts of a reality that needs to be forgotten. It is there that these authors and artists can collect some shards of memory, hit some harmless edge-balls, and win a few accolades that may help earn them some respect. In this way, even if an author or artist displays a sense of so-called conscience or valor, they simultaneously reflect the state’s openness with respect to the fields of politics and the arts, together with a sense of enlightenment. In reality, the result is simply the uneasiness of compromise and symbolic displays of resistance, which is not the same as real freedom, conscience, and bravery. The outcome of this symbolic resistance to compulsory amnesia is that it permits power to make even greater use of the reputation of the arts to help implement and expand a national strategy of compulsory amnesia.
Literature: Resisting Amnesia & Extending Memory
Recently, the Swedish author and poet Kjell Erik Espmark’s seven-volume novel The Age of Amnesia was published in Chinese translation. The work’s first volume, titled Amnesia, describes the protagonist’s loss of his memories — including his memories of love — and his subsequent attempts to recover them. This remarkable work explores the source of individual memory, as well as the frustrations involved in trying to recover one’s memories when one finds oneself in an amnesiac state. Memory, in this novel, becomes a living entity and not merely an object or temporality. This differs from Chinese-style amnesia, where memory loss is a national process and is a result of the exercise of state power. What is forgotten are people’s history and memories. Meanwhile, those who do forget are able gain wealth, power, and prestige, and can even use their amnesia to obtain an enticing object of exchange from the state.
Amnesia focuses on individual memory loss, describing an individual’s attempts to recover his former experiences, speech, and objects. Irrespective of what the author might have been thinking when he was writing this work, once the novel’s translation was published in China, it was immediately viewed as an allegory of a process of national amnesia. That is to say, the work was read as a process of national amnesia projected onto a single individual. In losing our memories, what we lose first are our people’s historical memories, followed by truth and reality. Eventually, every Chinese will come to resemble the novel’s narrator, losing memories of his life, his loved ones, his loves and hatreds, and his joys and distresses. In this way, the part of your brain responsible for memory becomes completely blank, waiting for society, power, and others to tell you — based on their own needs — how you should understand your history, your society, and even your own past.
The state, power, and society want the intellectuals they oversee — including individuals in every region of the country, at every level of society, and in every environment — to resemble young children. They want to manage the country the way a preschool teacher looks after the children under his or her charge, such that everyone eats when they are supposed to eat and sleeps when they are supposed to sleep. And when these virtual children are supposed to play, they will lift a large red blossom with an innocent smile and add their own song or performance to a script someone else has already written. To achieve this objective, it will be necessary for everyone to lose their memories and also their ability to speak, such that the minds of the next generation will become a blank slate — an empty sheet of paper waiting to be written on. Afterward, the nation may come to resemble an enormous preschool — a wasteland to be reclaimed or a tract of virgin land to be cultivated. However, just as every preschool inevitably has some unruly children who do as they wish and not what their teacher tells them, a nation will similarly always have some authors and intellectuals who won’t be willing to lose their memories and who will instead struggle to express themselves and allow the wings of their imagination to follow the path of soul, conscience, and art. They will struggle to flee the confined areas within which they are supposed to remain, and within any corner of history or reality, they will create works that contain memory.
Although memory is not the sole standard by which we may evaluate the worth of a work, it is certainly the most effective measure for evaluating whether a nation, party, or people is truly mature. Therefore, as an author I always retain a childlike fantasy — building on Ba Jin’s dream — that one day it might be possible to erect a memorial in China to the Cultural Revolution. More than three decades have passed since the beginning of the Reform Era, and by now the nation should be mature and consummate, and should have enormous powers of forgiveness, introspection, and memory. Therefore, someone should not only create a memorial to the Cultural Revolution (today, no one even dares raise this possibility) but also erect a plaque in memory of the people’s amnesia right in the middle of Tiananmen Square — the world’s largest and most-visited square. Inscribed on this plaque there should be a record of all the traumas and memories our nation has suffered from mid-century onward, including the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, the Three Years of Famine, the Cultural Revolution, and the student movement of 1989. A record of these national tragedies should be displayed in the most visible square in the world, informing everyone — Chinese and foreigners alike — that we Chinese are a mature, consummate people who dare to remember.
In this way, our nation would be truly great and respected, and would set an example for the world.
This essay is excerpted from Sound and Silence: My Experience with China and Literature. Copyright 2024, Yan Lianke. Introduction and English translation copyright 2024, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the Publisher.
✺ Published in “Issue 15: Pundits” of The Dial
