Abstract
This thesis explores how the Chinese population came to make sense of the collective traumas associated with the struggle for the new China. Amidst the search for new national meaning in post-Mao China, the “fifth generation” of filmmakers were eager to capture the emotional impact and reconstruct the historical past. The stories they told helped the people to reflect upon their common history. These films allowed ordinary people to discuss the past without official guidance. By employing a semi-supervised seeded Latent Dirichlet Allocation (seeded LDA) on film reviews of Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine on the Chinese online database Douban, this study presents a balanced map of four clusters of mentalities as distinct ways ordinary Chinese understand their historical past. Additionally, I examined the effectiveness of a top-down approach to culture through the study of contemporary presentations and reception of Chinese intellectual Lu Xun’s work. Analysis of popular expressions from online reviews of his short story collection Nahan and interviews conducted at the Shanghai Lu Xun Museum reveals a disparity between the official rhetoric and public perception of Lu Xun, along with generational conflicts in interpreting his legacy. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to deepen our understanding of how cultural and national narratives influence individual and collective consciousness within two dynamic systems: grassroots cultural interpretations through mass media and a top-down approach through education and institutions. The findings suggest that resilient and authentic thoughts fostered by grassroots interpretations may prove to be more sustainable than affected thoughts shaped by authoritative forces. This project thus contributes both empirically and methodologically to cognitive sociology and cognitively oriented social research.