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<\/a>\nYoung pioneers on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, 1965; photographs by Marc Riboud, whose exhibition \u2018Witness at a Crossroads: Photographer Marc Riboud in Asia\u2019 is at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York City, until March 23, 2015<\/p>\n
On the last stretch of flatlands north of Beijing, just before the Mongolian foothills, lies the satellite city of Tiantongyuan. Built during the euphoric run-up to the 2008 Olympics, it was designed as a modern, Hong Kong\u2013style housing district of over 400,000 people, with plentiful shopping and a subway line into Beijing. But it was a rushed job, and planners neglected to put in parks, open spaces, or anything for the public other than roads, which were quickly choked with cars. Construction was pell-mell, and the area has aged quickly, its towers crumbling and cracking.<\/p>\n
This rootless suburb is home to Remembrance, an underground journal that deals with one of China\u2019s most sensitive issues: its history. E-mailed to subscribers as a seventy- to ninety-page PDF every other week, Remembrance\u2019s articles and first-person accounts are helping to recover memories that the Communist Party would prefer remained lost. Remembrance has no listed address, let alone bustling editorial offices. But if it has a home, it is here, in one of Tiantongyuan\u2019s concrete apartments, a dark, ground-floor unit lined with bookcases and stacked with boxes of banned books\u2014a fittingly anonymous home for a publication that officially doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n
Remembrance is part of the rise of unofficial memory in China, a trend that resembles the appearance in the Soviet Union during the 1980s of groups like Memorial, a historical research society that helped undermine the regime by uncovering its troubled past. Today\u2019s China is more robust than the Gorbachev-era Soviet Union, but memory is still escaping the censor\u2019s grasp, posing challenges to a regime for which history represents legitimacy. The government still controls official history through textbooks, museums, movies, and the media. But memory is more private, and setting it down on paper can be presented as a personal enterprise, even when the outcome is highly political.
\nBesides Remembrance, China has roughly half a dozen other samizdat publications that explore the past through accounts of personal experience, including Scars of the Past (Wangshi Weihen), Annals of the Red Crag (Hongyan Chunqiu), and Yesterday (Zuotian). In addition, there are a growing number of underground documentary films, including some that send students to collect oral histories in villages that suffered during the Great Leap Famine or the Cultural Revolution.<\/p>\n
One Saturday this spring, several of Remembrance\u2019s regular writers stopped by the Tiantongyuan apartment for a pot of Pu\u2019er tea and a chat with the journal\u2019s cofounder, the retired film historian Wu Di. As they arrived, Wu leaned back in his chair and gave a running commentary on each. Among them were a computer data specialist at a technical university (\u201cthe greatest specialist on Lin Biao!\u201d), an editor of the Communist Party\u2019s flagship newspaper People\u2019s Daily (\u201cobviously he has to keep a low profile\u201d), and a befuddled professor who had to call Wu three times to get directions (\u201cwhat an egghead\u2014he knows everything about violence in the Cultural Revolution but doesn\u2019t know how to hail a gypsy cab\u201d).<\/p>\n
Ian Johnson DECEMBER 4, 2014 ISSUE Remem … Continue reading
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