Speaker: Yi Lu, Assistant Professor of History, Dartmouth College
Discussant: Daniel Koss, Associate Senior Lecturer on East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

The Chinese internet has recently been captivated by a meme: “the garbage time of history.” The phrase evokes the Soviet Union’s final, suffocating decades to suggest that China, too, has entered an era of stagnation. Beyond a general sense of anomie born from Covid-19 and economic malaise, the meme speaks to the very difficulty of remembering in Xi Jinping’s China — indeed, the posts themselves are quickly scrubbed.

Is China in the garbage time of history? This talk takes the concept seriously — as material, as metaphor, and as memento of our times — by exploring the fate of archives in contemporary China. Specifically, I focus on China’s grassroots archives, collections of de-accessioned Mao-era records salvaged by waste recyclers and sold in flea markets before being acquired by major universities. Once celebrated as counter-archives preserving history beyond the Party-State’s reach, what has become of these collections as archives are folded ever more deeply into China’s information security system and Xi’s project of national rejuvenation? Drawing on documentary research, ethnographic fieldwork, and quantitative analysis, I explore the challenges of remembering the past when revisionism, nationalism, and denialism make archives more politicized and precarious — and not just in China.

Yi Lu is a historian of modern China, with particular interests in the history of information, material culture, and digital humanities. He is currently Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College and completing his first book project, The Dustbin of History: Chinese Archives and Their Afterlives.