| The rites of death have traditionally been an important part of Chinese "ritual governance".For more than two thousand years,feudal rulers have used the rites of death to form the national beliefs of ’ancestor worship’,the values of ’loyalty,filial piety and righteousness’ and the political structure of ’family and state together’.It played an important role in promoting good and suppressing evil,strengthening social and ethical norms,uniting blood and kinship ties,and consolidating the feudal ruling order.Since the modern era,funeral rites have gradually evolved into memorial rites with both Chinese and Western characteristics,influenced by Western democratic thought.During the Yan’an period,in response to the problems of low political awareness,weak political cohesion,lack of political identification with the CCP,and lack of firm belief in Marxism among the revolutionary groups,the CCP took the opportunity to intervene in the planning and performance of memorial ceremonies,making them a politicised arena.During this period,the CCP incorporated its revolutionary ideas and theories into the symbolic memorial ceremonies,with a view to disseminating its policies,ideas,guidelines and lines through the memorial ceremonies,unifying the mindset and mobilising the people,and realising the overall political task of the national resistance and building the border areas.Therefore,the target audience of the CCP’s memorial service was not limited to those within the Party,but transcended ethnicity,party affiliation and class.Whether it was the Democratic Party or the Kuomintang,ethnic minorities or international friends,women and youth or workers and peasants,the CCP would hold a grand memorial service if they sacrificed their lives for the revolutionary cause.Firstly,in the memorial services during the Yan’an period,time,space and the behaviour of the participants carried specific political connotations as symbols,such as the promotion of a new order,the gathering of a new consensus,the strengthening of the participants’ identity as revolutionaries and their identification with the revolutionary group they belonged to-the The second aspect is that the words used in the memorial service are not only a symbol of the revolution,but also a symbol of the revolution.Secondly,the discourse in the memorial service follows the logic of sorrow-emotion-uplifting speech,constantly mobilising the emotional cohesion of the participants,promoting their understanding of the CCP political system and their belief in the CCP’s political ideals,and thus generating and sublimating Thirdly,in order to further extend the space for commemoration and to further develop the Thirdly,in order to further extend the space for commemoration,enrich the dimension of commemoration,and renew the value of commemoration,the CCP further expanded the connotation and value of memorial services after the memorial ceremony through paper media,spatial media,and activity commemoration,deepening people’s awareness,understanding and support for the CCP’s guidelines,lines and policies.Based on the above findings,the author argues that memorial services as commemorative activities played an important role in all political tasks of the CCP during the Yan’an period in propagating political ideas,stimulating political awareness,cultivating political trust and strengthening political beliefs.The adaptation and promotion of memorial services is not only a classic example of the CCP’s practice of commemorative activities and political consensus building,but also an important practice of combining Marxist theory with China’s concrete reality.In this sense,the CCP’s planning,performance and widespread implementation of memorial services not only contributed to the mature development of Marxist theories of Chineseization,but also formed a scientific and civilized death ritual,which played an important role in the transformation of customs and feudal ideology in the Shaanxi-Gan’an-Ning border area. |
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