Two major religious feasts were held recently, namely Passover (or Pesach) and Easter. At their core, these are celebrations of remembrance, of bringing to mind long ago events.
Yet through the annual re-telling of the story individuals and communities are also renewed for their days ahead. Memory works double time, bouncing from past to future to invigorate the present. While commemorations are static in that they deal with the dead, they are also dynamic in that their symbolic heft falls upon the living.
Just as Notre Dame's tumbling spire came to represent despair, and the preservation of the rose windows has come to represent hope, major acts of remembrance combine symbol and word, thought and emotion. Governments and major institutions worldwide are well aware of the power of memory and use multiple ways to seek to control the triggers of it.
In China, commemorations exist in abundance and the government promotes them with the fervour of an old-time preacher. Coincidentally, years that end in '9' have had a frequent way of being the occasion for events of high drama. Thus 2019 marks the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the People's Republic of China and 20 years since the Falun Gong was outlawed. In June it is 30 years since tanks entered Beijing, and it is the 60th anniversary of the Dalai Lama fleeing Tibet.
Some of these events will be celebrated with grand pageantry; over others the government will seek to exert rigorous control. In some cases the act of remembering will itself be repressed. Louisa Lim's book, The Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, details how one world event has become a date of no significance within China while often being marked quite passionately outside of it, thereby illustrating that when anniversaries hold together memory and symbol in a vital bond they are more than mere digits.
But can memory in fact be choreographed? Who determines what is and is not to be recalled? Whose birth and death, which clash and conciliation?
Even when commemorative events are staged to the final wave, there is no guarantee that other imaginings do not occur. They most certainly do. Thus, this year of all years, China's government would have contended with thoughts of memory and acts of public commemoration. Yet, for all the importance of the anniversaries listed above, there is one other '9' year that pre-dates them all.
"It will be fascinating to watch how the centenary plays out