ABSTRACT
For China the twentieth century constituted an ongoing history of sustained, inflicted catastrophe that included socially induced individual trauma. The government has forbidden any acknowledgement or debate concerning the Cultural Revolution. The project interviewed contemporary witnesses to the Cultural Revolution and in each case one of their children. This chapter offers an analysis of the question of individual and collective grief and trauma. In China, the effect of the Cultural Revolution should be measured by the extent of dismay caused in an enormous population in which the positions of culprit and victim alternated throughout the period. When the People’s Republic of China was established after a communist victory, a new chain of catastrophes commenced. A campaign was waged to annihilate evidence of China’s traditional culture. Recovering the language of a history that has been so traumatic for so many could enable China with its long history of advanced civilisation, to arise once again as “the middle kingdom”.
