Building a Collective Memory on Individual Lives: Obituary as a New Genre in 21st-Century China

In recent years in China, as elsewhere, there has been a spate of studies of memory and works based on personal memories, mostly on a non-official level but also in academic publications. The present article looks at a particular form of memory text, necrologies published in the press, a journalistic genre relatively new in China, one result among others of the commercialising of Chinese media. It examines a hundred or so death notices collected in a book by the editorial board of the daily newspaper Xin Jing Bao (Beijing News). Reading these stories, what emerges is a view of a society in transformation, a patchwork of the perceptive, emotional and moral experiences of men and women who have lived through crucial moments during the changes of the last thirty years. They reflect a growing emphasis on individualism in Chinese society and “the remaking of the person in China’s emotional and moral context”. The stories told in the necrologies cut across well-known and lesser-known current social issues, often implicitly criticising the status quo and official narratives. In this sense, they are part of a more general greater autonomy the media take advantage of to bring delicate issues to the attention of the public, possibly leading to changes in official political discourse and even in decision-making.