Abstract: Since the late 1980s, the Chinese people have begun to commemorate the Cultural Revolution, the traumatic past in China’s recent history, with warmth, affection and even zeal. Joining in this new trend in China's popular culture and literature, Dai Sijie's recent filmic production Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress fashioned similarly sunny, warm and idyllic memories of the Cultural Revolutionary era, provoking from viewers a deeply nostalgic sigh.
This paper situates the filmic text in the larger "rewriting the Cultural Revolution" phenomenon. Besides arguing against the popular diagnosis of global nostalgia, and uncovering the hidden messages of resistance to the Maoist culture and ideology in the film, it also discusses the Chinese mentality in dealing with trauma, the new modes of consumption and commercialization of history and memory, the influence of modernity and the global epidemic of nostalgia, and the meanings and problems of all these complications in the remembering and creating of the past.