'To Be Worthy of the Suffering and Survival': Chinese Memoirs and the Politics of Sympathy'

Around the mid-1980s a substantial number of Chinese authors started to write, beyond national and linguistic boundaries, about their traumatic experience during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Jung Chang's Wild Swans (1991) is among the first and best-known titles in this emergent literary formation. Whether the memoirs are narrated by a former People's Liberation Army soldier, or a Red Guard, or an innocent subject drawn into the political vortex, their authors all assume the role of victims who bear witness to a China collapsing into an administered ‘national madness’. Details of the brutalities of the Revolution presented in the memoirs resonate with the Western imagination of Maoist China. This article is a critical study of these memoirs. It explores the political and ethical implications of life writing in the post-Cold War era within the context of global capitalism. Given the cultural and political topicality of the Cultural Revolution as a subject for popular history writing in the West, the production of these memoirs, we argue, is occasioned and enabled by a specific set of geo-political conditions, whose temporal and spatial materiality defines and determines the use and pertinence of the memoirs

Cultural policy between the state and the market: Regulation, creativity and contradiction

China's spectacular economic development has altered radically not only the accepted understanding of the relationship between cultural work and the state, but also the social foundation of state cultural policy. Cultural industries are subject to a set of new regulatory forces. This essay discusses the emergence of these new forces that govern cultural work and considers how cultural practice must respond to both the state's political demands and market imperatives. We will pay special attention to the new conditions under which the state ideology is forced to limit its traditional role and to seek to assert its legitimacy and authority in new forms. Thirty years after the reforms, it is no longer possible to insist on the total authority of cultural policy emanating from the state ideology. In addressing contradictions in the management of cultural work brought about by the reforms, this essay will consider challenges faced by the Chinese government, including such issues as national cultural identity, protection of regional and minority art forms, social responsibility of art and the tension between high and commercial culture. © 2012 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.link_to_subscribed_fulltex