In 1986 the writer Ba Jin called on his country to build a museum of the Cultural Revolution: “In order that everyone sees clearly and remembers clearly, it is necessary to build a museum of the ‘Cultural Revolution,’ exhibiting concrete and real objects, and reconstructing striking scenes which will testify to what took place on this Chinese soil twenty years ago!”1 China’s leaders have since acknowledged that Maoist extremism was a “mistake,” yet Ba Jin’s vision has never been realized and the general state of public amnesia about the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and the Anti-Rightist Movement persists. Jie Li attempts to fill that memory hole with a book that is in some ways a scholarly study of museums and memory, in some ways a proposal for a brick-and-mortar museum, and in some ways a virtual paper-and-ink Memorial Museum of the Mao Era.
Jie Li specializes in...
University of California Press