In Gejiu, a tin-mining town in southern Yunnan, cultural workers in the 1970s created an Exhibition on the History of Class Struggle in the Gejiu Tin Mines and a Recollect Bitterness Center. These joint exhibitions became the premier “classrooms” for class education in Yunnan province, instructing as many as a thousand visitors a day. During the 1950s, cultural workers in Gejiu had authenticated the local truth of Chinese Marxist history by displaying personal stories of capitalist exploitation, rags worn by miners in the inhumane “old society,” and drawings of worker uprisings. The exhibitions they created during the Cultural Revolution added historical reenactment as a new technique of political instruction. Historical reenactment primarily took the form of yiku (“recollecting bitterness”), narratives about oppression and liberation recited by the elderly. The practice of yiku invoked the older, powerful practice of suku (“venting grievances”), a method of class struggle during the land reforms of the 1940s and 1950s.

Written renditions and live performances of yiku featured prominently in class education exhibitions, amplified by the artwork and the display of pre-liberation artifacts. This historical reenactment enjoined visitors to “learn through experience” (tihui) the exploitation, oppression, revolt, and liberation of the Chinese proletariat. The Recollect Bitterness Center even recreated the very time and space of the narrated events. Crawling through an old mine shaft and emerging upright into the light, visitors to the Center performed the metaphorical choreography of emancipation and its structure of historical memory. This instilment of perceptual knowledge about the nature of classes and the meaning of proletarian revolution produced an embodied understanding of Chinese Marxist history, interpolated new political subjects, and incited socialist construction.

Image: Old miner, Su Wenchang, recalls his suffering in the "old society" at the “Man-Eating Pit” of the Recollect Bitterness Center in Gejiu