12 - Culture as Historical Foil: The Great Leap Forward

Summary

This chapter covers the reinforcement of revolutionary memory in the wake of the largely rural ravages of the Great Leap Forward famine around 1960. It considers how the ritualized consumption of revolutionary memory, in both intimate and very public practices, among the rank and file of the People’s Liberation Army spread to the general population in various ways, using the example of southeast Shanxi’s Jin district. It then covers classroom instruction and class-conflict exhibitions to consider how cultural memory was employed as a foil against which mass starvation under the New China was contrasted. Finally, it considers a sample production of the Four Histories movement: the volume The People of Taihang (Taihang renjia) from 1964, which was part of the larger Socialist Education movement aimed at producing local communal memory inflected with elements of revolutionary memory. The result was a reinvigoration of revolutionary memory in the 1960s that equipped a new generation with the resources for political combat on the basis of historical conditions many had little experience of themselves.