After decades of interruption and stagnation in Mao's era, the Chinese memory studies, together with sociology and anthropology, was finally reborn in the "reform and opening up" period since the 1980s. Based on an overview of major sociological and historical journals and books in Chinese, this paper argues that "gravitational memory" best illustrates the features of Chinese memory studies (and epistemology of memory in general), comparing to the sociology of memory in the West. "Gravitational memory" refers to the power relations among various "fields" and contexts in which the memory construction process is embedded. These "fields" can be political, cultural, and commercial, among others. While memory construction in democratic societies in the West is like a "free market," where actors compete to define memory with relatively full agency, memory construction in China is heavily influenced by "gravity" of the political field-the state's coercive influence over other fields (being cultural or social) strongly affects the representation of the past. Thus, the Chinese state becomes a "meta-field" for other fields, and the actors in this context act only with limited agency. While "gravity" in China comes mainly from the state, gravity in the West might come from other fields. In this sense, this paper also aims to shed light on epistemology of memory in general: if we want to understand memory, we should not forget the power relations of the fields in which memory construction is embedded.
