The Politics Of Memory:the Re-discovery Of The Great Production Movement

The persistence of power originates from people’s belief of its governance legitimacy. Consequently, the cultivation of the belief is the prime task of every regime, while one of the key paths to cultivate the belief of legitimacy is to manipulate memory, highlighting, forgetting, revising and recalling continuously, and reconstructing and embedding. How a ruling party constructs and propagates the social memory of its revolutionary tradition is a significant political problem which can directly influence its legitimacy of power.The "Great Production Movement" has been the largest economic construction activity, since the Communist Party of China founded. It played a unique and important role in CPC’s founding history. The significance of the movement for CPC is that the movement not only fast and efficiently saved the economic crisis of the border region by high political mobilization of different social groups to complete the task of economic construction, but also built a relatively firm basis of economy and social identification for CPC’s "Yan’an way". The policies adopted in the movement to stimulate the enthusiasm for work were wide applied in different historical periods. A large number of texts about this historical event were produced and spread under the manipulation of power discourse, which constructed a piece of common social memory owned by Chinese people, which is the "Nanniwan Spirit", taking "self reliance" and "hard struggle" as its core. The social memory on the "Great Production Movement" has become one of the main legitimacy sources of CPC’s political power, and influenced the Chinese society deep and fully. However, most existing studies follow the official discourse paths, aiming at cooperating with the power executors’ policies. If focuses can be put on how the ruling party constructed social memory by narrative on the "Great Production Movement" and the process of continuously constructing political legitimacy identification, relative studies can offer creative contribution on theories.Following the research path of social history, this dissertation takes the social memory theories and discourse analysis ones as the basic theoretical framework, and the research method of historical documents and discourse analysis as the basic research methods. With field survey and deep interview, it tries to analyze the frequency of key words in relative news in the full-text database of People’s Daily, to deep study the "Great Production Movement", and to answer the following two questions:1. What is the essence of the "Great Production Movement"? How has it influenced the society at that time and later?2. How did the narrative texts on the "Great Production Movement", taking the "Nanniwan Spirit" of "self reliance and hard struggle", construct the relative social memory of citizens of PRC?By studying the two questions, the author analyzes the process of the social memory on the "Great Production Movement" being continuously constructed, tries to review the entangling relations between power and discourse, and to interpret the movement and how the memory on it has been passed on and deep influenced the contemporary society.The dissertation is divided into seven chapters."Introduction", the first chapter, states the research origin, theory framework and methodology; the second chapter studies the background of the "Great Production Movement", and points out that the movement was an emergent political mobilization to solve the legitimacy crisis of the newborn red regime; the third chapter analyzes the process of how the political issue, the movement was proposed and endowed with sacredness; the forth chapter studies the forming process of four core memory codes of the "Nanniwan Spirit", the core of the "Great Production Movement"; the fifth chapter discusses how the power realized the social control and transformation by the commendation of the exemplar and punishment of the less advanced, and how the power reconstructed and manipulated social memory by highlighting, forgetting, revising; the sixth chapter points out the three peaks when the movement memory appeared in new China’s political discourse by analyzing the key word frequency in People’s Daily, and discusses the three reconstructing process of the movement memory in the three peaks and its social influence; the seventh chapter studies how the "Nanniwan Spirit" is narrated in rural areas in contemporary China and the how it is reconstructed in social reality.In Conclusion, the author mainly sets forth three points:1. The "Great Production Movement" as emergent motivation in wartime:The author points out that the Great Production Movement essentially was an emergence political mobilization in wartime by CPC as the ruling party of border region to solve the political legitimacy crisis caused by economic difficulty firstly. By a series of activity such as resorting to nationalism and endowing it with saving the country, CPC successfully led the economic and political crisis caused by fast population rise to areas outside of the border region. They stimulated the dissatisfaction towards the blockade of the border region and the lack of military expenditures, stimulated the pride sense to solve problems by oneself, united the social identification, and solved the legitimacy crisis of the newborn red regime.2. The "Great Production Movement" as political legitimacy sources:The author holds that the producing and propagating process of memory on the movement is a classical case of the state power manipulating social memory for the sake of political needs. The relative memory on the movement, in essence, is a systematic construction of revolution discourse controlled by the ruling party based on the ideology of nationalism.In the bi-discipline of "production-rectification", lots of left-wing young intellectuals embedded a series of discourse order assigned by power as "self reliance and hard struggle" into the historical event of the movement with stylized narration and created a complete set of semantic codes based on the narration, which circulated in the form of a series of complicated texts, and constructed a complete meaning network. It constructed a series of social memory such as "self reliance and hard struggle","organizing","deep fish-water friendship" and "fair relationship between officers and soldiers". This social memory was reconstructed continuously in different political situation in CPC’s later developing periods, and also offered generous resources of political legitimacy to the ruling party.3. The "Great Production Movement" as discipline ways:The author points out that the measures taken to stimulate productive forces contained many authoritarianism elements, which obviously shows the social control and transformation in the level of economic basis. With group pressure, by the commendation of the exemplar and the "help" and punishment of the less advanced, people in most areas of the border region, especially rural areas, were carefully organized, located and trained, and became docile and useful productive forces which could be handled in the whole-process supervising production. The producing process was also a process of a fully controlled society to become a paramilitary one. The movement, together with the rectification campaign aiming at unifying transformation of ideology, realized the bi-discipline of "production-rectification". In addition, unilaterally stressing on the significance of physical labor in the movement, actually meant taking labor as a way of bitter moral practicing, and forced people, especially intellectuals, to choose following and loyalty through self examining of their souls.The author specially points out that while affirming the achievement of the movement, we should also see that the "experience of the success" has been constantly copied in social transformation in later China. The authoritarianism elements are magnified by more and more radical policies, and finally become the production tool of alienating people to achieve particular political goals.