Those looking for horrors in China’s recent past have no shortage of examples to choose from: the 1967 massacre of more than 9,000 people by Communist party cadres in Dao County, who threw the bodies of “class enemies” into a river to decompose; the starvation and cannibalismof thousands of prisoners at Jiabiangou, a labour camp in Gansu, in the late 1950s. For many, however, the struggle is being allowed to remember that such events happened at all.
Memory is a compelling and slippery topic for students of China. Books such as Tania Branigan’s Red Memory have demonstrated how even people who lived through the Cultural Revolution struggle to make sense of what their memories are actually telling them. And the government demands total control over the official narrative: China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has warned against “historical nihilism” and believes the collapse of the Soviet Union came about because people were allowed to question, and lose faith in, the party’s version of the past.
