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ID:
185868
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| Summary/Abstract |
There is a common perception that the Chinese state promotes fabricated accounts of the Second World War and the Communist Party's role in that conflict. Despite a growing scholarly interest in the history and collective memory of China's war experience, this perception has rarely been scrutinized, and the field has been slow to recognize recent shifts in China's memoryscape. This study draws on the concept of historical statecraft to compare official accounts with the historical record and explore how the Chinese party-state uses war memory for political purposes. It finds that its desire for national unity and international recognition have led Beijing to espouse a narrative of the Second World War that, despite significant gaps, is more representative and historically accurate than ever before. Simultaneously, the analysis shows that the Chinese leadership, at what it sees as a high-stakes juncture in China's nation-building project, increasingly monopolizes and mobilizes the memory of the war for the purposes of self-legitimation, control and strategic posturing. Although there are signs of China normalizing and globalizing its history, its official war memory reinforces an inwardly-directed form of Chinese nationalism. Analysts should take Chinese war memory seriously and study the implications of Beijing's new historical statecraft.
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| 2 |
ID:
187930
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| Summary/Abstract |
The literature on World War II memory in China is skewed toward the history of the occupation and victimization of the eastern provinces. This study shifts the focus to the southwestern city of Chongqing, which served as China’s temporary wartime capital and the seat of the CCP–GMD united front. Comparing distinctive thematic narratives of four state museums, this research shows that Chongqing is not an outlier in China’s memory scape, as is often presumed. Rather, it finds that these narratives draw selectively and purposefully from local experiences to instantiate and reaffirm the evolving central line. Chongqing’s story of unified resistance and joint triumph exemplifies the more inclusive and empowering new norm of war remembrance under Xi Jinping, which stresses national unity as the key to Chinese ‘greatness’.
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