MCLC: Yan Lianke on amnesia (3)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Jonathan Benney <arijdb at nus.edu.sg>
Subject: Yan Lianke on amnesia (3)
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My colleague, Zhang Juan, is currently working on a research project in
which she uses "amnesia" to characterise the reconstruction of trading
post towns on the China/Vietnam border. (Her presentation is described
here: 

http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/cluster/events_details.asp?clusterid=MI&eventid=1
393

As Yan did in his article, she found that there was very little public
knowledge of the China/Vietnam war. What is more striking is that younger
people living on the borderlands did not know that the war had occurred,
and even those locals who had lived through it were deliberately erasing
it from their memories in their pursuit of a discourse of growth and
economic cooperation.

I'm also reminded of a similar anecdote: parents who had participated in
the protests at Tian'anmen in 1989 were asked how they described their
involvement to their child. They replied that they had deliberately never
mentioned them, even though they were proud of their involvement: above
all, they wanted their child to succeed in the gaokao and didn't want to
provide them with any information not relevant to the syllabus.

Of course all of these so-called amnesias are selective. There will always
be an elite who has access to the information or knows how to get it -
SWUFE students, in Mr Bate's case. But in China the way in which people go
out of their way to forget information which is directly relevant to their
lives - both with and without the intervention of the state - goes far
beyond mere historical ignorance or intellectual laziness.

Jonathan Benney
Asia Research Institute
National University of Singapore