10 - Communal Memory

Summary

This chapter explores the process behind local cultural-memory production in Guyuan, the devastated regional hub of eastern Gansu at the time of the Haiyuan earthquake of 1920. It considers three textual forms of communal memory produced over the twentieth century – published diaries or memoirs, wenshi ziliao (Cultural and Historical Materials) and difang zhi (city or district gazetteers) – for what they reveal about fundamental tensions within official, party-sponsored records, in other words between revolutionary and communal accounts of the past. The chapter examines the extent to which the language and broader system of values from the republican period lived on in official local records through the Maoist People’s Republic and afterwards. Held up against Maoist storytelling on the old society, gazetteer biographies and wenshi ziliao accounts provide profoundly mixed messaging on “how things used to be,” from mutual-aid practices to civic life, before the interventions of the Communist Party. The chapter then turns to the question of silences in the communal record, of the limited role of women in communal memory and how this evolved over time, and the fate of the historical record of Guyuan’s Muslim population.