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 how the Chinese woodcut rose to prominence on a surge of social and ethnographic interest among Chinese artists over the 1930s who, through the medium, sought to speak for the voiceless and downtrodden, and increasingly of those in rural contexts. The chapter aims to show how the woodcut genre helped create a new political position that personified the popular experience of what became known as the old society: if revolutionary memory was a form of overarching metanarrative joining the past to the present, what populated its landscape were what this chapter calls forsaken subjects. These subjects inhabited a civic vacuum of predatory social relations, moribund in its capacity for historical change and therefore backward and “feudal.” Over the course of war with Japan and its aftermath of civil war, the woodcut evolved from portrayals of social desolation – of moral impasse and cultural failures – to affirmative messaging, one that assigned new codes, values and frames of reference to social life, at times executed with the juxtaposition of the old and new China. The woodcut, as this chapter aims to show, offered a visual analog to May Fourth-New Culture depictions of communal life a quarter of a century earlier.