Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedzrik discusses how trauma affected people’s memory regarding the Great Famine (1959-1961) in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). I think her article was fascinating because firstly, she used other examples from Germany and the Holocaust to enrich her argument about the Great Leap Forward and its effects on Chinese society, thus highlighting a global trend that trauma can affect individual and collective memories. Moreover, her argument was intriguing because she discusses the politics behind the ‘taboo’ topic of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine.1
Firstly, the Great Leap Forward occurred between 1958 and 1962. It was the PRC’s Second Five Year Plan. This plan focused on turning China into a primarily agrarian country into an economically prosperous, industrial and communist society. Communes for agriculture cultivation was a central feature of this plan. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) created collective farming associations that aimed to increase productivity and make farming more efficient. This part of the plan failed because of outrageous goals that were set, and no one could keep up with their goals, and thus people were over-worked, and weather problems also occurred; therefore, many people ended up starving due to this policy. Another policy during the Great Leap Forward that led to an economic downturn was the use of backyard furnaces. Backyard furnaces were a tool the CCP used to make steel in people’s backyards out of scrap metal. This did not work because of labour division and ended up being a total failure for the CCP. Eventually, these policies and more led to the Great Famine, which is estimated to have caused 45 million deaths.2
Because this issue highlighted the CCP’s incapacity, the party banned criticisms of the CCP and banned people from talking about the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine at all.3 Moreover, Weiglein-Schwiedrzik discusses the fact that the Great Leap Forward was a topic amongst party members that led to in-fighting; therefore, emphasising the ‘taboo’ nature of this topic.4 However, she discusses the idea of ‘collective memory’ and how despite the efforts of the CCP to have people ‘forget’ the Great Famine by banning the discussion on the topic (to stop ‘communicative memory’), people still remembered because of Famine’s direct effect on people as well as the inability of the CCP’s policies to reach ‘grass-root levels of Chinese society’. This means people living in the countryside.5
I believe this is important because Weiglien-Schwiedrzik highlights that the collective memory of a specific traumatic event (such as the Great Famine) cannot be forgotten because of the individual’s experience and their memory. The individual’s memory will continue to remember the traumatic event, even if some details are altered. Moreover, if the individual memory becomes the collective memory, and then thus the ‘communicative memory’, it can become a ‘cultural memory’.4 This is significant because the ‘cultural memory’ highlights that an individual remembering the Great Famine will make others who have ‘forgotten’ the event remember (the collective memory). Its discussion (the communicative memory) will illuminate the cultural importance of the event. That is why she argues that the result of a 2000 poll in Mainland China, people named the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine as one of the most important events of the twentieth century.6 Thus, China and its people did not forget the Great Famine.
- Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, ‘Trauma and Memory: The Case of the Great Famine in the People’s Republic of China (1959-1961)’, Historiography East and West 1: 1 (1 January 2003), pp. 39-67. [↩]
- Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 (London, 2010), p. xiii. [↩]
- Weiglein-Schwiedrzik, ‘Trauma and Memory’, p. 50. [↩]
- Ibid. p. 49. [↩] [↩]
- Ibid. pp. 47-52. [↩]
- Ibid. p. 41. [↩]