10 - (Grand) Father of the Nation? Collective Memory of Sun Yat-sen in Contemporary China

Summary

Introduction

Reform and opening up in 1978 was a starting point for China to change its economic and social system gradually. This gradual change brought about certain political changes as well. When Deng Xiaoping initiated the reforms that transformed economic and social structure of China, he refrained from identifying the ideological orientation of the process. However, it soon turned out that it actually mattered “if the cat was black or white” because the structural changes that the country going through was changing the identity of its people as well. The transformation that the state and society were going through required identifying the sources of this new identity, and both the ruling elite and the community influentials in the society got engaged in an ongoing search for different symbols that would legitimize the new order. Ideologies such as liberal Westernism, schools of thought such as Confucianism, historical periods such as Ming dynasty or Republican era are among the many to serve as a source for the collective identity of Chinese state and people in the making.

These changes in the state structure and society required a re-evaluation of values to associate with. While some of these values were new to China, either imported as a policy or as an inevitable result of increasing interaction with the outside world, some other sources of legitimacy for the new regime were to be found in its own past. Selective remembering and interpretation of history becomes not history as documented but collective memory as a source of contemporary values and identifications. When old ideals are abandoned, collective memory provides values people can identify with. Selectivity of what to remember helps justification of the new orders and mindsets.

There are two simultaneous challenges that the new government face: (1) how to legitimately incorporate the “continuities and discontinuities” (Aguliar 2002) of Mao era in their new identity; (2) how to fill the vacuum that the absence of the image of Mao Zedong in the collective consciousness.