Virtual Museums of Forbidden Memories: Hu Jie’s Documentary Films on the Cultural Revolution
The day after Bian Zhongyun, vice principal of a girls’ middle school in Beijing, was beaten to death by her students on August 5, 1966, her husband, Wang Jingyao, bought a camera and took pictures of her bruised, distended, and naked body. He photographed their children as they washed and dressed their mother. He photographed the vilifying big-character posters that covered the inside and outside walls of their apartment. He also photographed the smoke rising from the chimney of the crematorium after her body was burned. He kept the photographs for four decades, waiting all the while to transfer them into the Cultural Revolution Museum, if such a museum is ever to be built (fig. 1).
The idea for a Cultural Revolution museum is usually attributed to Ba Jin, one of the most influential writers in contemporary China and a prominent survivor of persecution and incarceration during those “ten years of catastrophe.”1 Ba Jin had first made this appeal in his best-selling 1986 memoir, Random Thoughts (Suixiang lu),2 and many Chinese intellectuals have echoed this wish over the past two decades. Although the government has consistently ignored their pleas and circumscribed scholarly studies of the period, unofficial forms of memory have proliferated in autobiographical accounts and marketplaces of “CultRev” memorabilia collections. Maoist kitsch and propaganda, recycled into avant-garde and political pop art with more irony and cynicism than critical reflection, have also come to be exhibited in art galleries and consumer spaces around the world. In 2005 a private museum dedicated to the state-sponsored terror and turmoil of the Cultural Revolution finally opened in the remote city of Shantou, Guangdong Province, enabled by the good official connections of its founder and financier and by the sheer obscurity of its location.3 Nevertheless, the museum has received little press in China and could hardly compete with the many popular destinations of the state-sponsored “red tourism” that “eulogizes the brilliant cause of the [Communist] Party.”4 In the meantime, however, many “virtual museums” of the Cultural Revolution have been set up on the Internet, hosting historical images, documents, personal narratives, and scholarly articles.5 The “holdings” of these “museums” often overlap and replicate themselves in cyberspace, fighting, flaunting, and flirting with the cyberpolice in their tireless self-proliferation, marrying piracy with democracy, trauma with nostalgia, memory with amnesia. Yet their virtual and unofficial status has consistently kept the discourse around the “Cultural Revolution Museum” in the future tense, an unfulfilled but increasingly reiterated wish, in Ba Jin’s original formulation, to “stop history from repeating itself.”6
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Notes
I presented an earlier version of this article at the Visible Evidence Conference (Bochum, Germany, December 2007) and wish to thank the organizers and participants for their feedback. I am also grateful for the helpful comments of David Rodowick and David Wang.
- Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 18.
- Ba Jin, Suixiang lu (Random Thoughts) (Beijing: Sanlian, 1987).
- Its founder, Peng Qian, was a former Shantou deputy mayor with crucial support from regional officials, and one of the museum’s main financial contributors is a Hong Kong businessman known for his ties to Beijing. See Hamish McDonald, “At Last, Someone Dares to Blame Mao,” May 14, 2005, www.theage.com.au/news/World/At-last-someone-dares-to-blame-Mao/2005/ 05/13/1115843368043.html.
- Lin Di, “China’s First Private Cultural Revolution Museum,” June 29, 2006, en.epochtimes.com/ news/6-6-29/43345.html; Howard French, “Scenes from a Nightmare: A Shrine to the Maoist Chaos,” New York Times, May 29, 2005; “ ‘Re-experience the Long March’: China to Launch ‘Red Tourism’ Project,” July 22, 2004, english.peopledaily.com.cn/200407/22/eng20040722_150461.html.
- The following virtual museums of the Cultural Revolution are noteworthy: Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution, www.cnd.org/cr; Morning Sun: A Film and Website about Cultural Revolution, www.morningsun.org; Chinese Holocaust Memorial, www.chinese-memorial.org. See also Guobin Yang, “ ‘A Portrait of Martyr Jiang Qing’: The Chinese Cultural Revolution on the Internet,” in Re-envisioning the Chinese Cultural Revolution, ed. Ching Kwan Lee (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 287 – 316.
- Ba Jin, “A Cultrev Museum,” in Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience, ed. Geremie Barmé and John Minford (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 381 – 84.
