HKU Bulletin October 2016 (Vol. 18 No.1)

One paper that received a lot of attention was written by Master of Journalism student Lei Feifei, who considered what Mao might have ‘tweeted’ in the run-up to and during the Cultural Revolution. Her imagined tweets included: “I’m a Party member and I’m a citizen. You [referring to Deng Xiaping] don’t allow me to participate in the Party conference and that is a violation of Party rules. You [referring to Liu Shaoqi] don’t allow me to speak and that is a violation of the Constitution.” References and links to Lei Feifei’s article appeared briefly on social media inside Mainland China, but have since been removed by government censors. Returning to the scene Qian Gang said that studying the birthday papers enabled the students to “return to the scene and to seek historical evidence, truth and interest in the written record of the time. Students are challenged to sort out the truth from the propaganda and work out which materials are valuable. Through this method, they learn how to turn journalism history into personal narratives. In the end, they get a better idea of the context around important historical points.” Students felt the project gave them a better idea of the ongoing power struggles within the Communist Party, foreign policy issues and how disasters such as the Great Famine of 1960– 1961 occurred. The papers also revealed much about how people suffered through the Cultural Revolution. Some of the students wrote about actors and actresses who were purged for their involvement in the arts. The Birthday Papers Project has also attracted press attention within Hong Kong, gaining coverage in several local papers. █ Historic perspective If Twitter had been around during the Cultural Revolution, what would Chairman Mao have tweeted? A project by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre seeks to provide an answer. Fifty years after the start of China’s Cultural Revolution, students and alumni of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC) found new angles and insight into the historic event when they compiled new articles based on the original reporting in papers dating back to their parents’ birth dates. Director of the JMSC’s China Media Project Mr Qian Gang said the thinking behind the exercise was to give students insight into the lives and socio-economic conditions in China as it would have been experienced by their forbears. The ‘Birthday Papers Project’ began as a class assignment for which students were asked to research news reports which were published on the day their parents were born and to use them as a basis for analysis of the historical period. Such was the interest in the assignment that it grew into a full-blown project, drawing information not only from national and local newspapers but also on video and audio recordings from the time. Qian Gang also teaches at Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School, and his students there did a Birthday Papers Project too. Some contributors have even travelled back to their hometowns to search the archives of local newspapers. The JMSC students have been producing two or three of these ‘newspapers’ a week since January. The first ones focussed on events leading up to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which began on May 16, 1966, with a public notification from Chairman Mao Zedong warning the country that enemies of communism had infiltrated the Party and needed to be purged. Students are challenged to sort out the truth from the propaganda and work out which materials are valuable. Mr Qian Gang Mr Qian Gang teaching students how to ‘read newspapers’ in a different way during one of his classes. Reimagined in a class exercise – tweets from Mao: “I’m a Party member and I’m a citizen. You [referring to Deng Xiaoping] don’t allow me to participate in the Party conference and that is a violation of Party rules. You [referring to Liu Shaoqi] don’t allow me to speak and that is a violation of the Constitution.” A group of Chinese children in uniform holding Mao Zedong’s ‘Little Red Book’ during China’s Cultural Revolution. 27 | 28 The University of Hong Kong Bulletin | October 2016 Research