Since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party has attempted to shape public percep¬tions of China's history through what activist Fang Lizhi terms ‘the Chinese amnesia’ – a process by which public memory is moulded and certain recollec¬tions systematically excluded from the public realm. This process was central to the Party's totalitarian rule in the decades following 1949, and it remains crucial to their hegemonic strategies in the present. If filmmakers such as Ou Ning are laying the foundation of an ‘alternative archive’ detailing the transformations of China's present from a grassroots perspective, Nanjing-based filmmaker Hu Jie is similarly using the documentary form to reclaim the representation of China's recent past from the political imperatives of the party-state.

Hu's films attempt to undermine the CCP's hegemonic dominance by publicly sharing the individualised memories of ordinary citizens who lived through the Maoist era via on-screen interviews, providing eyewitness accounts drawn from the heterogeneous realm of minjian, where history was experienced in diverse ways by individuals outside the power elite as they responded to the mass movements and campaigns of the Maoist period. Hu's approach to representing history on screen is a direct contrast to the top-down collective historical narra¬tives stressing the advancement of the nation under the CCP that are propagated through the official public sphere of film and television.

Although Hu Jie's documentaries are part of a broader trend of oral history recording that is developing in China, his films are distinguished by the particular political inflection he lends the act of historical recounting, as he highlights stories that invoke the brutality and divisiveness of the Maoist years and airs claims that many figures responsible for that period's abuses are still in positions of power today. Through his use of contemporary interviews, Hu is also able to illustrate how the persecutions of the 1950s and –60s continue to resonate in the present – unlike official histories that characterise the abuses of Maoism as mistakes and aberrations now neatly consigned to the past. Most importantly, in his work Hu Jie uncovers a suppressed history of dissident texts from the 1950s and –60s that directly challenge the image of a completely unified people propagated through the monopolistic public sphere of the Maoist period, and the simplistic image of that era proffered in today's official film and television products.