Using the example of 1950s historiography, this chapter aims to analyze why the CCP has not succeeded in dominating China’s collective memory. In doing so, it will identify four main reasons for the party’s failure: first, the weaknesses of the resolution from 1981; second, the phase(s) of intellectual and academic freedoms in the 1980s; third, the CCP’s inability to overcome inner-party disagreements on the question of how the Party should assess its own “historical mistakes”; fourth, the fact that memories cannot be suppressed permanently. The chapter shows that the historiography is an ongoing process that is not yet completed, and that China’s current president Xi Jinping’s politics of history has led the CCP into a dead end since this political approach attempts both to suppress alternative views of post-1949 history and to finally establish official narratives on a long-term basis.

Like their predecessors, Communist officials initially placed strict restrictions on birth control and abortion, encouraging high fertility rates. Focusing on the early years of the People’s Republic from 1949 until the Great Leap Forward, this chapter shows that even in this constrained environment, literature on sex and birth control continued to be published, promoting disparate narratives on sexuality and fostering diverse local contraceptive practices. The need to more fully mobilize women’s labor led to a gradual loosening of birth control limitations. Yet, the availability of information about sex, as well as access to birth control, abortions, and sterilizations, differed dramatically according to location, class, and education level.

Chapter 8 focuses on Wang Yuanhua, a Party scholar and celebrated initiator of the intellectual liberation and New Enlightenment movements of the 1980s. In the 1990s Wang was active in Party ideological debates as intellectuals rebounded from the repression after Tiananmen. Wang’s assessment of intellectual life in the Party comes out in his discussion of historical figures:

Du Yachuan (a conservative during the May Fourth era) and the famous late Qing reformers Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. Writing inside China and under Party rule, Wang holds these historical examples up as contrasting models for intellectual integrity under authoritarian regimes. Wang’s own path from Christian schoolboy to Marxist revolutionary to moderate liberal offers a characteristic example of the winding path of Chinese intellectuals over the course of the 20th century. Wang’s formative years were at Tsinghua University in Peking, where his Japanese-educated father taught English. Having joined the Party in the 1930s, Wang fell from grace during the anti-Hu Feng campaign in 1955, and his refusal to implicate the disgraced writer as counterrevolutionary put Wang in the political doghouse for two decades. Yet he returned to Party service after Mao’s death, but became an advocate for thought liberation in the 1980s and for Chinese liberalism in the 1990s.

Chapter 4 focuses on the career of the actress Shangguan Yunzhu, from bourgeois film star in late 1940s Shanghai to re-educated “art and literary worker” in post-revolutionary New China. Shangguan’s early career and education enjoyed limited success but built on her fortuitous affiliation with the left-wing Kunlun Film Company. Shangguan’s post-revolutionary private and professional life had ups and downs, including allegations against her husband, Cheng Shuyao, during the Three Antis campaign (anti-corruption, anti-waste, anti-bureaucracy) in 1951. Her return to the limelight as a re-educated “old star” came in the context of PRC cinema of the mid-1950s. The controversy surrounding a much-publicized 1956 dinner she had with Mao Zedong shaped Shangguan’s own political fortunes compared to those of her colleagues during the Anti-Rightist movement of 1957. Finally, Shangguan was denounced over a series of humiliating struggle sessions at the start of the Cultural Revolution, which coincided with a diagnosis of terminal breast cancer, together leading the actress to commit suicide in 1968. Shangguan’s legacy, with her close relationship with Mao and Jiang Qing, reveal the persistence of metropolitan modernity in spite of the Party’s mainstream revolutionary socialist discourse.