New Approaches to the Mao Era (1949-1976): Everyday History and Unofficial Memory – NAME

This project aims to lift the disciplinary barriers between various approaches to unofficial history of the Mao era, as well as breaking new ground in each of the disciplinary areas (access to new archives; field work with hitherto undocumented citizen memory groups).
This interdisciplinary approach is warranted by the nature of the object, as the new historiography of the Mao era is progressively emerging from different forms of critical confrontation by the Mao generation with its own past. Therefore, the research team will combine various types of methodology: archival research, interviews and participant observation in citizen memory associations, compiling and analyzing published literary oral history sources and independent documentary films devoted to the subject.

Before launching the project, a preparatory conference titled “Fate of a Generation, Fate of a Country: History and Memory of China’s Down to the Countryside Movement” was held on December 6-7, 2012 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in collaboration with the Research Centre for Hong Kong History and Humanities (Prof. Ho Pui-yin). The conference papers are now being reviewed and evaluated by the members of the French team prior to their publication.
The launch of the project was followed by:
- the hiring of a post-doctoral researcher from March 22, 2013.
- the creation of a webpage on the CEFC website containing the basic information on the project. This page will progressively gain content and once the CEFC website is revamped in early 2014, it will host the database on independent productions dedicated to the memory of the Mao era.
- defining the format for the database of independent memory productions (documentary films, autobiographies, literary works, journals) and the compiling of a draft filmography of documentary films produced in China from 1991 on, and dedicated to the Mao era.
- several field study trips (see below for details).

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International Conference “Fate of a Generation, Fate of a Country: History and Memory of China’s Down to the Countryside Movement”, coordinated by Michel Bonnin and Ho Pui-yin, CEFC & CUHK, 6-7 December 2012.
Publication of: Frank Dikötter, The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957, Bloomsbury, August 2013.

Much of the research published on the Mao era – the early 1950s, the Anti-Rightist movement, the Great Leap Forward and the famine, the Cultural Revolution – relies overly on Party sources and various types of internal but nonetheless official publications. Archives are difficult to access and first-hand accounts are often skewed, providing little information about the everyday lives of ordinary people. In recent years, there has been a slight opening of archival sources, and in parallel, a significant development of oral history projects in China, as the generations of first-hand witnesses of Maoism reach old age. They open a fruitful realm for new research, both on everyday society under Maoism as a historiographical object and on the way Maoism is remembered by ordinary people. These two components – the documentation of history and the preservation of memory – are inseparable in the emergence of a critical history of Maoism.
We propose to investigate various aspects of this field, ranging from new archives and oral histories of everyday life under Mao, in particular the violence that characterized social relations at the time, to the contemporary efforts devoted to preserving a non-official memory of Maoism. These efforts call into question the Party’s monopoly on writing the history of the People’s Republic. While some of the “memorial” activities developed by former Rightists or Educated Youths are nostalgic and generally uncritical, many other forms of association and sociability are based on the desire to critically confront the past, using the tools of research and historiography, in order to build a “popular” or “unofficial” (minjian) history of post-1949 China.
This project relies on ongoing work by the researchers involved, including Frank Dikötter’s recent book Mao’s Great Famine, Wang Aihe’s investigation of a group of underground artists during the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Xun's two volumes with Yale University Press on archival and oral sources on the Great Leap Forward, Michel Bonnin’s study Lost Generation based on extensive interviews with former sent-down Educated Youths, Jean-Philippe Béja’s investigation of several citizen history associations in China and their significance for the civil rights movement (weiquan yundong), and Sebastian Veg’s work on how ordinary memories of the Anti-Rightist movement are documented in literary works and independent documentary films.