The introduction lays out the rationale behind Modern Erasures and the approach it takes to the study of cultural memory of China’s recent past. The book breaks down the latter into two types of memory generated by communities and the varied forces of national revolution, respectively – what the book terms communal and revolutionary memory. It also discusses challenges posed by the historical record on early republican China, and on rural areas in particular, and what the prism of disaster events and mutual aid offers researchers in the study of remote, rural communities. It then considers the study of Maoist culture and violence, followed by the implications that historiographic gaps in knowledge on early twentieth-century rural China have for the study and understanding of modernity and colonialism on a global scale. Finally, it explains the use of the terms deinscription and reinscription for the processes of cultural erasure examined throughout the book.

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.