Chinese Journal of Sociology

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The Paradoxes of Solidarity: Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity in Mao’s China

  

  1. GAO Rui，Departent of English, School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University
  • Online:2015-05-20 Published:2015-05-20
  • Contact: GAO Rui, Departent of English, School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University E-mail:gaomeimeiyale@gmail.com

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Abstract: The millions of Chinese people who had the misfortune of living through the War of Resistance Against Japan (hereafter “the War”) experienced nearly unbearable trauma and pain. Such vivid and massively shared suffering and injustice, however, remained ultimately private and individual. For many years after the building of the People’s Republic of China, this suffering seldom found its way into the public sphere of expression.
A chief goal of this paper is to delve into this curious phenomenon—namely, the “absence” of a collective trauma of the War despite the human suffering—and seek to explain it from a cultural sociological point of view. To this end, I would draw on the theory of cultural trauma and explore the relationship between various cultural structures in the process of trauma formation. The absence of the trauma of the War should not be understood merely as a consequence of political necessity, but should be contextualized and comprehended within the web of meanings woven by powerful cultural structures that predominated in the public sphere at the time.
My tasks in this chapter are twofold. First, I trace in Mao’s era the successful construction of a class trauma that sought to form a new collectivity. Secondly, I examine how the experience of the War fits, or, rather, “unfits” with this grand narrative of “class trauma”. Tracing representation of the War in the public sphere around the time, I argue that the emergence of the War as a collective trauma was effectively “inhibited” by the trauma of class struggle.

Key words: representation
, collective identity , cultural trauma , memory of war