Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China (Cambridge Studies in the History of the People's Republic of China)

In the 1980s, as China transitioned to the post-Mao era, a state-sponsored oral history project led to the publication of local, regional, and national histories. They took the form of written and transcribed personal testimonies of events that preceded the turmoil of both the Cultural Revolution and, in many cases, the Communist victory in 1949. Known as wenshi ziliao, these publications represent an intense process of historical memory production that has received little scholarly attention. Hitherto unexamined archival materials and oral histories reveal unresolved tensions in post-Cultural Revolution reconciliation and mobilization, informing negotiations between local elites and the state, and between Party and non-Party organizations. Taking the northeast Russia-Manchuria borderlands as a case study, Martin T. Fromm examines the creation of post-Mao identities, political mobilization, and knowledge production in China. "In the early 1980s, in the town of Heihe on China's northeast border with the Soviet Union in what was formerly northern Manchuria (Bei Man), a teacher, editor, and local Party official named Liu Banghou unearthed documents containing transcribed interviews that had been hidden away for over a decade during the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Fifteen years earlier the Heilongjiang provincial government had sent a group of researchers to the Heihe vicinity to seek out and interview elderly residents who had migrated to the area before 1900 from "China Proper" (mostly Shandong and Hebei provinces). Specifically, they targeted individuals whose destinations had included Blagoveshchensk, the city directly across the river from Heihe on the Russian side, and an area just to the east of Blagoveshchensk formerly known as the "Sixty-Four Villages East of the River" (jiangdong liushisi tun) that had long been a source of dispute between the two countries"-- Provided by publisher In the 1980s, a Chinese state-sponsored oral history project led to the publication of local, regional, and national histories. These histories are the basis of this innovative study of ideology formation and political mobilization, post-Cultural Revolution reconciliation, and the recovery of borderland identities in early post-Mao China.