Reverberations of Collective Traumatic Memories from a South Korean Movie to June Fourth and Jiabiangou

Abstract

This article begins by probing why the South Korean film banned in China, A Taxi Driver, would receive high accolades from so many Chinese netizens, and why the Chinese websites would suddenly delete all mention of and comments about the film by the end of October 3, 2017. This incident reveals a stark contrast between two countries: the democratic South Korean government has created and maintained the collective memory of the 1980 Gwangju Democratization Movement and reconciled past injustices, whereas the authoritarian Chinese regime has continued to erase the memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Pro-democracy Movement and June Fourth Massacre and forbid any discussions and investigations into the truth. After discussing the movie’s transnational reverberations of collective traumatic memories, this article suggests that the taboo on June Fourth drove some concerned authors to write about disasters caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) from the Mao era. Examining the writer Yang Xianhui’s (1946- ) strategies to both dodge censorship and unearth the traumatic memories of the Jiabiangou labor camp rightist-inmates from 1957 to 1961, this article argues that Yang’s stories and other authors’ or filmmakers’ works on Jiabiangou would create reverberations of traumatic memories, contribute to collective memory, and indirectly resist the state violence that represses the memories of the CCP-manufactured tragedies.