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Testimony, History and Ethics: From the Memory of Jiabiangou Prison Camp to a Reappraisal of the Anti-Rightist Movement in Present-Day China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2014

Sebastian Veg
Sebastian Veg*
Affiliation:
French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC), Hong Kong. Email: sveg@cefc.com.hk.
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Abstract

The memory of the Anti-Rightist Movement has long been a blind spot in Chinese debates, with historiography limited to elite politics and little engagement with the repercussions of the movement at grassroots level. However, the publication of Yang Xianhui's 2003 book, Chronicles of Jiabiangou, marked a turning point. Based on extensive oral history interviews, Yang's book makes a substantive connection between the Anti-Rightist Movement and the establishment of dedicated laojiao camps such as Jiabiangou in Gansu province. Documenting what he claims was a policy of dehumanization, he suggests that intellectuals were far from the only victims of a movement characterized by its extra-legal procedures. Ordinary people were often drawn into it and were more able than intellectuals to resist the legitimizing discourse of loyalty to the Party to which many intellectuals continued to cling. For Yang, the testimonies of the Rightist victims in Jiabiangou provide a fruitful field in which to investigate the breakdown of elementary social trust in society during the Anti-Rightist Movement. Situated ambiguously between oral history and literary intervention, Yang's work has, together with other recent publications such as Tombstone, contributed to reopening the debate on Maoism in Chinese society today.

Keywords

Anti-Rightist MovementmemoryChinaoral historyreeducation through labour (laojiao)Yang Xianhui
Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 218 , June 2014 , pp. 514 - 539
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2014 

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Footnotes

*

An early draft of this paper was presented at the HKUST symposium, History and Fiction, 10 January 2011, and more substantial ones at the seminar on modern Chinese history, Kyoto University Institute for Humanities, 8 July 2011, and at the AAS meeting in Toronto, 17 March 2012. The author hereby thanks all those who gave valuable comments at those times.

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