The Future of Cultural Memory in an Amnesiac China

How are we to inherit? What are we to inherit? And to what purpose?—such are the questions that must be asked with particular urgency in China, a country that both inherits a civilization several millennia old and is slated to become the next dominant world power. Burdened with the immense weight of a tradition that reaches back to the age of the pyramids, China sees itself as launched on a phenomenal ascent in power that seems to encounter no obstacles. An extraordinary tension arises in this way between two contrary and contradictory movements: precisely themovements indicated by the title of this colloquium, the word “inheriting” suggesting an orientation toward the past, and the phrase “and then?” pointing toward the future. In the case of contemporary China, the question posed in these terms can only give rise to a series of paradoxes. If we begin by asking, “What is worth inheriting?” it quickly emerges that, unexpectedly, China has preserved immaterial monuments in preference to material ones. When we turn to the modernization process, we will see that the Chinese have had to face the dilemma of, on the one hand, needing to jettison their past into the