Intro: What are oral historians in China up to? OHMA Director Amy Starecheski shares her impressions from a recent trip to Beijing.

I have taught budding and experienced oral historians from China for years, talked with colleagues who have visited Chinese oral history centers, and eagerly read Alexander Freund’s recent OHR article and Paul Thompson’s recent OHJ article on the history of oral history in China, but now see that I had a very limited grasp on what is happening with oral history in China until I actually went myself.

This November I had the privilege of giving the keynote lecture at China International Oral History Week, organized and hosted by the Cui Yongyuan Center for Oral History at the Communication University of China, in Beijing. Hui Lin, deputy director of the center, initiated this event five years ago, and continues to lead it.

The center is named for its founder and director, a very well-known television personality who fell in love with oral history when he and his team began doing interviews to learn about the history of Chinese film. These roots explain the Center’s home in a university dedicated to training media professionals, as well as the glamour surrounding this oral history work. Five hundred people packed the venue for the opening ceremony of the week, attracted by the chance to hear stories from the ten projects selected to be highlighted, but also to see television stars and famous artists in person, bantering about the importance of oral history.

American oral historians can only dream of such attention.

The featured projects showcased a sophisticated range of interdisciplinary oral history work. A project with veterans, based in a social service center, arose out of a recognition that the need to care for veterans extends to care for their stories. One project with Errenzhuan folk artists in Northeast China included a life history interview as well as several hours of recordings of each artist at work and in their daily life, combining ethnography, documentary, and oral history. Later sessions included papers on oral history and reminiscence therapy, the critical value of nostalgic narratives, oral history and place-making, and the history and future of oral history as a field. I heard debates about oral history and storytelling, and passionate conversations about metadata, that would be very familiar to American oral historians.

The narrative about oral history in China I had always heard (a narrative repeated by scholars presenting at the conference) was that in the 1980s Chinese academics belatedly discovered Western-style oral history, and are now still playing catch-up. As Freund writes, this story obscures both the thousands of years of traditional oral history practices in China and pre-1980s oral history in modern China. It is hard to know, but my sense is that political issues prevent many Chinese oral historians from acknowledging and accessing these post-1949 and pre-Cultural Revolution projects and practices. A long history of state surveillance and forced public confession surely shapes the way today’s Chinese citizens narrate their lives in oral histories, as does an even longer history of oral storytelling.

It was exciting to begin to tease out the unique history and practice of oral history in China in face-to-face conversations with colleagues. Contemporary projects do include many histories of workers and soldiers, as one might expect (and is also the case in the United States) but they also include histories of ethnic minorities, women, artists, and rural communities. Even within the context of seemingly politically inoffensive projects, there is much complexity within the interviews, as well as methodological and theoretical innovation.

One thing that stood out was the scale of the work. China is a big country, with big oral history projects. In 18 years, the Cui Yongyuan Center for Oral History has already collected 10,000 interviews, with copies stored in a climate-controlled area on site and in a backup location in another city.

The archive also includes significant collections of artifacts from the history of film, such as newsletters and posters dating back to the 1930s, diaries, and letters. Highlights are displayed in several galleries in the center’s four-story building.

To protect the privacy of narrators who may be speaking about sensitive issues, the full database is only available onsite, as are the interviews. Only information at the project level is available online. However, the Center also produces high-quality PBS-style documentaries using the collections, which are viewed widely on television. Because of state censorship and fear of exposing narrators or centers to sanctions, few if any Chinese oral history archives place their collections online. They do, however, have robust internal databases to catalogue their work – a panel on which I served as commentator included three papers on database development. As American oral historians increasingly wrestle with the ethics of interviewing narrators who are subject to government surveillance and persecution, such as undocumented immigrants, we may have something to learn from our colleagues in China, who have much more experience in balancing the need to preserve stories with the risk of harm to narrators.

There were two other American oral historians at the conference, and at least one colleague from Singapore, but the vast majority of attendees were working or had roots in China. Mainly because of language barriers, Chinese oral historians continue to struggle to engage in dialogue with international colleagues and we with them, and their work remains unknown to many outside of the country. I saw several fascinating presentations by colleagues I had never heard of who had worked in the field for decades and written multiple books I cannot read about oral history method and theory. This is of course partly my typical American anglo-centrism, but still, cross-translation is desperately needed.

Former OHMA faculty Gerry Albarelli taught a three-day intensive workshop before the conference. Several OHMA alums are now working, and sharing their training, in China. Xiaoyan Li (2015) serves as an interviewer and researcher at the center, and played a significant role in translating and organizing the week’s programming. Haitao Fan (2011) is a well-known author, working on her fourth and fifth oral history-based books right now: one a history of Xiaomi and the other about genetic science in China now (her third book was a memoir about her time at OHMA!). In my lecture, I shared work we are doing at OHMA to mobilize oral history for social justice work, interpret and amplify oral history through the arts, and to use the social sciences to ask new questions of and with oral history. A sold-out crowd was inspired by the work of Nyssa Chow, Christina Barba, Carlin Zia, in translation

Still, we have much more to learn from each other, and look forward to more connections and conversations in the future. As American oral historians rethink the history of our field, who and what it has excluded and included, we can learn from a careful study of how oral history practices have developed in other contexts around the world, from Aotearoa New Zealand to Turkey to China.

Want to join the international conversations about oral history? Consider attending the International Oral History Association meetings – next one is in Singapore, June 2020.

Thank you especially to Alina Min for being such an enthusiastic and knowledgeable exploration partner and Xiaoyan Li for organizing this visit, making it fun, and tirelessly, brilliantly translating.