Forgot ten Victims of the Cultural Revolut ion Naming Ordinary

In October of 2000, I launched a website, www.chinesememorial.org, to record the names of the people who died from persecution during the Cultural Revolution. Through years of research, involving over a thousand interviews, I had compiled the stories of hundreds of victims, and placed them on the website. By clicking on the alphabetically-listed names, a user could access a victim’s personal information, such as age, job, date and location of death, and details about how he/she was murdered or committed suicide after being tortured and humiliated. The web memorial reached many Internet readers in China, and I was soon receiving several emails every week, even though Chinese people had much less Internet access then than they do today. Most readers saw this as a very valuable project and some offered me help. However, in March 2002, seventeen months after the Web site was launched, Beijing authorities blocked it, and readers in China cannot visit it anymore. Why did the Chinese government block a web memorial that contains nothing but the names and life stories of victims? What harm do the authorities find in such information after the Chinese government announced the rehabilitation of all of these victims as long ago as 1979? How much distortion has historical writing on the Cultural Revolution suffered through lack of a record of the victims? The blocking of the website raised questions that had been on my mind for years before I was invited to contribute a paper on the topic “official history and parallel history” of the Cultural Revolution. In this paper I will argue that acknowledging individual victims has been a crucial problem in writing the history of the Cultural Revolution and represents the major division between the official history that the Chinese government has allowed to be published and the parallel history that cannot pass the censorship on publications in China. As of today, no published scholarly papers have analyzed the difference between the two resulting branches in historical writings on the Cultural Revolution. Given that the authorities who control China’s Internet and media have demonstrated their “sensitivity” and have resorted to silencing the voice of the victims, comparative research on the issue is required. I will discuss the victims in the history of the Cultural Revolution from factual, interpretational, and methodological aspects. The discussion is based on the documents and interviews I have collected on the Cultural Revolution over the last 20 years, and on how the history of the Revolution has been written during this time.