When Memory Exceeds History: The Emerging Visual Internet Archive on the Cultural Revolution

One of the areas that the advent of the Internet has changed most profoundly is the relationship that human beings have with their past. Sources that would once have been barely accessible after a difficult and taxing search are now available to one and all, and can be compared to more traditional texts in real time. The article sets out to show how knowledge of Mao’s China and the Cultural Revolution in particular will benefit significantly from the immense pool of recordings and video clips available on the Internet. Although there are obvious risks in working with online material, the Internet provides researchers with an unprecedented and potentially almost limitless documentary archive. This online material is not just important for research and historical knowledge, but primarily for its political impact: the persecutors and victims of those times have spoken out and deposited their evidence on line, exercising a faculty that the post-Maoist political institutions had long denied them. In doing so they have turned themselves from passive historical figures into active political agents.