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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
This essay explores representations of Japanese imperialism and war in museums of the People's Republic of China. With the post-Mao reforms, there has been a general trend in such representations toward an emphasis on atrocity and victimization and away from the narratives of heroic resistance that dominated in the Mao era. Yet, the museum curators in these museums must negotiate between these two representations in trying to make the war relevant to a young audience generally more attracted to the pleasures of popular culture than history museums.
[1] See Ken Sekine, “Verbose Silence in 1939 Chongqing: Why Ah Long's Nanjing Could Not Be Published.” MCLC Resource Center, 2004. The novel was first published as Nanjing xueji (The bloody sacrifice of Nanjing) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1987).
[2] The online China News Digest Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall has published an English translation of a 1962 work called Japanese Imperialism and the Massacre in Nanjing. The translator, Robert Gray, writes in the introduction that “In 1962, scholars at Nanjing University's Department of History (Japanese history section) wrote the book Japanese Imperialism and the Massacre in Nanjing (Riben diguozhuyi zai Nanjing de datusha) based on extensive materials they uncovered during a two-year investigation into the Nanjing Massacre. After it was written, the book was labeled a classified document (neibu ziliao) and could not be published openly.”
[3] Mark Eykholt, “Aggression, Victimization, and Chinese Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre,” in The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, ed. Joshua Fogel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 11–69.
[4] Ian Buruma, “The Joys and Perils of Victimhood,” New York Review of Books (April 8, 1999), 4–9.
[5] The fact that the hibakusha, the victims of the atomic bombing, are at the forefront of remembering the war and of the peace movement in Japan, would suggest that Buruma's remarks are not universally true.
[6] E.g., see Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–1945, and the American Cover-Up (New York: Routledge, 2002).
[7] Mitter suggests that as the Maoist ideology and its pivotal historical moments lost resonance for the Chinese people in the post-Mao era: “In looking for a theme to inspire unity, the leadership was forced to turn to the cataclysmic event of the century, War of Resistance to Japan.” See Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum,” 280. To highlight the point, Mitter compares the War of Resistance museum representation with that of the older Chinese Military Museum (Zhongguo Junshi Bowuguan), which stresses in its treatment of the war the struggle between “Communist virtue and Nationalist evil” (p. 282). Mitter implies that prior to the Deng era, the War of Resistance did not play an important role in myth making and political legitimization, which is not the case. However, there certainly was a renewed attention to the war and new forms of remembering it in the post-Mao era, which I take to be Mitter's principal point.
[8] I have in mind Dai Qing's work on the Wang Shiwei and Chu Anping incidents in Yan'an. See Dai Qing, Wang Shiwei and “Wild Lilies”: Rectification and Purges in the Chinese Communist Party, 1942–1944 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).
[9] For a discussion of the culture of “bobos” (bourgeois bohemians) and “neo-tribes” in China, see Jing Wang, “Bourgeois Bohemians in China? Neo-Tribes and the Urban Imaginary,” China Quarterly 183 (September 2005): 532–48.
[10] Arif Dirlik, “‘Trapped in History’ on the Way to Utopia: East Asia's Great War Fifty Years Later,” in Perilous Memories, in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), ed. T. Fujitana, Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 311.
[11] Peter Gries, China's New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 43–52.
[12 Eric Johnston, “Political, Economic Rivalries Blamed: History Not Key Issue,” Japan Times, April 19, 2005.
[13] There are other museums in China that deal with Japanese atrocities, e.g., the Pingdingshan Massacre Museum (in Fushun, Liaoning), the Northeast Occupation Hall at the Manchukuo Palace (Changchun, Jilin), and the Northeast Martyrs Memorial Hall (Harbin). The former, established in 1972, promotes itself as the museum that represents the history of Japan's “first” massacre on Chinese soil. In September 1932, Japanese soldiers slaughtered 3,000 villagers at the foot of Pingding Mountain. More recently, a private War of Resistance Museum opened outside Chengdu. Initiated and financed by a local entrepreneur, Fan Jianchuan, the museum, which is part of a complex of museums that includes exhibition halls devote to the Cultural Revolution, is billed as the largest private museum in China. Interestingly, this private museum does not construct clear historical narratives in the same explicit way that most state museums do.
[14] A slew of scholarly books published in recent years focuses on the topic of neonationalism in the PRC. In addition to Gries, China's New Nationalism, see Lowell Dittmer and Samuel S. Kim, eds., China's Quest for National Identity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1993); Yingjie Guo, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China: The Search for National Identity under Reform (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); and Jonathan Unger, ed., Chinese Nationalism (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996).
[15] From “ZhongRi liangguo renmin yinggai shishi daidai youhao xiaqu” (The people of China and Japan should be friends generation after generation), a speech given on September 15, 1972, during the visit of the Japanese prime minister to China. The phrase originates from the Zhanguo ce (Chronicle of the Warring States).
[16] See Paul A. Cohen, “Remembering and Forgetting: National Humiliation in Twentieth-Century China,” Twentieth-Century China 27, no. 2 (April 2002): 1–39. Karl Gerth's study of the relative failure of the “national products” movement in Republican China would suggest that average urban Chinese were indeed forgetting about national humiliation and were more concerned with daily survival or with enjoying foreign consumer products. See Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003).
[17] Citing a 1990s survey of a group of fourth graders, Waldron points out that only 30 percent could identify Mao Zedong and only one could sing the entire national anthem, but all knew the Hong Kong pop singer Liu Dehua (Andy Lau). See Waldron, “China's New Remembering,” 976. I should add that the state in the PRC has aggressively developed Web sites promoting patriotic education, many with a recurring theme of not forgetting. One such site is called Wuwangguochi.
[18] Cohen, “Remembering and Forgetting,” 2.
[19] Haiyan Lee has suggested that “sentiment” is a key element in forging a sense of shared history and national community. See Haiyan Lee, “Sympathy, Hypocrisy, and the Trauma of Chineseness,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 76–122.
[20] James Edward Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 6. For a discussion of memory sites, see also Pierre Nora, ed., The Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
[21] For a discussion of this downplaying of class in Chinese museums, see Kirk A. Denton, “Museums, Memorial Sites and Exhibitionary Culture in the People's Republic of China,” China Quarterly 183 (2005): 565–86.
[22] Susan Sontag makes this argument in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 1977). In her more recent Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), she questions her original argument and asks skeptically: “What is the evidence that photographs have a diminishing impact, that our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities?” p. 105).
[23] In the United States alone, there are at least four major Holocaust museums (in New York City, Washington, Los Angeles, and Houston). For a general discussion of memorialization with regard to Holocaust museums, see Young, Texture of Memory, the opening sentence of which reads: “The further events of World War II recede in time, the more prominent its memorials become” (p. 1).
[24] For discussions of the new remembering of the World War II in Asia, see Arthur Waldron, “China's New Remembering of World War II: The Case of Zhang Zizhong,” Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 4 (1996): 869–99; Sheila M. Jager, Narratives of Nation-Building in Korea: A Genealogy of Patriotism (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2003); the special “Asia-Pacific War: History and Memory” issue of the IIAS Newsletter (September 2005); and Jui-te Chang, 2001. “The Politics of Commemoration: A Comparative Analysis of the Fiftieth-Anniversary Commemoration in Mainland China and Taiwan of the Victory in the Anti-Japanese War,” in The Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern China, ed., Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2001), pp. 136–61. In terms of museum representations, see Laura Hein and Akiko Takenaka, “Exhibiting World War II in Japan and the United States,” in Japan Focus.
[25] For a discussion of globalization and its effects on Chinese museums, see Li Wenru, ed., Quanqiuhua xia de Zhongguo bowuguan (Chinese museums under the condition of globalization) (Beijing: Wenbo, 2002).
[26] Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), translated into Chinese in 1998, is but one example. The real impetus for remembering the Nanjing Massacre occurred in 1982, with the Chinese response to the textbook controversy in Japan. See Daqing Yang, “The Malleable and the Contested: The Nanjing Massacre in Postwar China and Japan,” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), ed. T. Fujitana, Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 50–86. For an overview of new research on the Nanjing Massacre, see David Askew, “New Research on the Nanjing Incident,” Japan Focus (2004). General studies of the Nanjing Massacre include: Joshua Fogel, ed, The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Feifei Li, Robert Sabella, and David Liu, eds., Nanjing 1937: Memory and Healing (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2002).
[27] Qi Kang, Qin Hua Ri jun Nanjing datusha yunan tongbao jinianguan (Memorial to the victims of the massacre by Japanese invaders of China) (Shenyang: Liaoning Kexue Jishu, 1999).
[28] Wang Yiting, Baiyi e'mo (Evil in white coats) (Pingfang: Hua Ri Jun Di Qisanyi Budui Zuizheng Chenlieguan, n.d.), 2.
[29] Iris Chang famously made this link in the subtitle to her book (The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II) on the Nanjing Massacre, but Buruma suggests that this linking goes all the way back to the 1946 Tokyo Trials. See Ian Buruma, “The Nanjing Massacre as a Historical Symbol,” in Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing, ed. Feifei Li, Robert Sabella, and David Liu (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 1–9; the citation here is on 7. In the United States, a group of Chinese Americans has formed a museum devoted to Japanese imperialism in China and is calling it the Chinese Holocaust Museum. See Buruma, “Joys and Perils of Victimhood”.
[31] Lin Biao's 1965 tract on the War of Resistance is typical of Maoist representations of the war period. Lin tells the story of the heroic victory of a weaker nation against a much more powerful foe. Lin explains this “miraculous” victory with three main points: (1) The war was a “genuinely people's war” and had the support of the people, (2) Mao's military strategy of “guerrilla warfare” was effective, and (3) the war effort was guided by Mao Zedong Thought. See Lin Biao, Long Live the Victory of the People's War (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965).
[32] War films were numerous in the Maoist era. Two obvious examples are Didao zhan (Tunnel warfare; directed by Ren Xudong, 1965;) and Xiao Bing Zhang Ga (Little soldier, Zhang Ga; directed by Cui Wei and Ouyang Hongying, 1963), the latter of which is currently being remade.
[33] “The March of the Volunteers” (Yiyongjun jinxingqu), with lyrics by the playwright Tian Han and music by Nie Er, became the “official” national anthem only in 1982, before which it was used unofficially in that capacity. During the Cultural Revolution, of course, because Tian Han was denounced, “The March of the Volunteers” was replaced by “The East Is Red” (Dong fang hong). For a discussion of “The March” and other songs from the war period, see Robert Chi, ‘“The March of the Volunteers’: From Movie Theme Song to National Anthem,” in Ching Kwan Le and Guobin Yang, eds., Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Press, 2007), 217-44; and Chang-Tai Hung, “The Politics of Songs: Myths and Symbols in the Chinese Communist War Music, 1937–1949,” Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 4 (October 1996): 901–29.
[34] Although my concern here is the discursive use of the war in postrevolutionary political rhetoric, I should point out that some Western scholars also see the war period as critical. As David Apter and Tony Saich argue, the war period made possible Mao's “Republic” and the “revolutionary discourse” upon which it was founded. See David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). Of course, the war was always only a chapter in the larger narrative of liberation. However, I take issue with Rana Mitter and Arthur Waldron, who argue that the war was not an important part of Maoist constructions of the past. Waldron cites as evidence the absence of a central war memorial in the Beijing cityscape, and Mitter suggests that before the 1980s the war occupied only a minor place in historical narratives, such as that found in the Military Museum. Although their intention is to shed light on the new significance of memory of the war in the post-Mao era, Mitter and Waldron give the false impression that memory of the war was a blank in the Maoist era. See Rana Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Nationalism, History and Memory in the Beijing War of Resistance Museum, 1987–1997,” China Quarterly 161 (2000): 278–93; and Andrew Waldron, “China's New Remembering.”
[35] Museums officials told me that funding was scarce, and they did not know when the renovation would begin, let alone be completed.
[36] More recently, in the summer of 2005, the museum put on an exhibit in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the victory of the Anti-Japanese War called “The Ruins and Crimes of the Harbin Police Headquarters of the Manchukuo Puppet Regime.”
[37] For a discussion of this museum, see Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum.” For an excellent discussion of the historical resonances of the site of the Lugou Bridge, see James A. Flath, “Setting Moon and Rising Nationalism: Lugou Bridge as Monument and Memory,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 10, no. 2 (2004): 175–92. I also used the following museum publication: Zhongguo renmin kangri zhanzheng jinianguan (Memorial of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against the Japanese) (Beijing: Zhongguo Heping, 1998).
[38] The 2005 renovation substantially transformed the museum's exhibitions. Three special exhibits—the Japanese Army Atrocities exhibit, People's War exhibit, and Martyrs Hall—have been eliminated, though elements of each have been integrated into a single comprehensive exhibit, now titled Great Victory (Weida shengli). Great Victory is characterized by a new emphasis on the war as a key part of the larger global anti-fascist struggle. The war is still represented as a critical period in Chinese history, but rather than a chapter in the larger narrative of revolution and liberation, it is now a pivotal period in China's emergence as a global power. As exhibition placards put it, the war marks “the great renaissance of the Chinese people,” in its transition from “weakness” (shuaibai) to “flourishing” (zhenxing). Clearly, the ideological impetus behind the exhibition's representation of the war is connected to China's new status in the global economy and its pretensions to global greatness. That the emotionality of the second stage exhibition has been muted marks perhaps a more rational approach to the war that is consistent with China's maturation as a member of the community of nations.
[39] See Mitter, “Behind the Scenes in the Museum.” In a September 2005 speech commemorating the sixteith anniversary of the victory of the war, Hu Jintao made this recognition of Nationalist war efforts part of official party rhetoric. Moreover, the war is now commonly framed as a dimension of the larger antifascist struggle in World War II, which I believe is connected to the larger discursive project in the contemporary PRC of connecting China with the world (zou xiang shijie or yu shijie tong gui).
[40] Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum,” 286.
[41] Mitter, ibid., also notes the innovate use, perhaps influenced by Western memorials, of an “unknown” soldier for the central statue in the hall. Although it may be true that “unknown” soldiers are not generally used in Chinese war memorials, they do appear frequently in revolutionary oil painting. For a discussion of images of martyrs in Chinese revolutionary mythology, see Kirk A. Denton, “Visual Memory and the Construction of a Revolutionary Past: Paintings from the Museum of the Chinese Revolution,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, no. 2 (Fall): 203–235.
[42] Buruma suggests that the idea for the memorial was Deng Xiaoping's. See Buruma, “Nanjing Massacre as Historical Symbol,” 8. Daqing Yang asserts that the memorial was a direct response to the textbook debates of 1982 in Japan. See his “Mirror for the Future or the History Card? Understanding the ‘History Problem.‘” In Chinese-Japanese Relations in the Twentieth-First Century: Complementarity and Conflict, ed. Marie Soderberg (London: Routledge, 2002), 15–16.
[43] Qi Kang, Qin Hua Ri jun Nanjing datusha, 7.
[44] Ibid., 7–8.
[45] Ibid., 8. The memorial won the Liang Sicheng prize for design in 2000. This was the first year of the prize, and it was presented to several architects for work done as far back as 1960.
[46] Qi Kang shows awareness of the difference of doing a memorial for Yuhuatai and the Nanjing Massacre memorial. See ibid.
[47] The sculpture is apparently based on a shot in the American missionary John Magee's documentary film footage of the atrocities.
[48] Buruma, “Nanjing Massacre as Historical Symbol,” 9.
[49] Ido not mean to suggest here that this and other memorial sites are not sometimes used by people for the expression of local and personal concerns that are sometimes at odds with official state policy, only that these uses are ultimately circumscribed by the state.
[50] Although not exclusively responsible by any means, Ishii Shiro is considered the father of Japanese medical and germ warfare experiments in Manchuria. In 1932, shortly after arriving in Manchuria, Major Ishii established a factory for immune experiments in the warehouse district of Harbin, but for human experimentation he needed a more remote spot that could not be seen by the foreign community. He soon came upon the town of Beiyinhe, about 100 kilometers south of Harbin, where he established the Zhong Ma Camp (Zhongma cheng). This was used as a base for experimentation until 1937, when the camp was disbanded and destroyed after a prisoner insurrection. In 1936, Ishii was appointed head of the Water Purification Bureau, in reality a front for his experiments. In 1936, Pingfang was selected as the new location for Unit 731. It was completed in 1939, having some seventy-two structures. Until the end of the war, experiments in germ warfare were conducted on thousands of Chinese. For general information of Unit 731, see Hal Gold, ed. Unit 731 Testimony (Tokyo: Yen Books, 1996).
[51] Although Benjamin's notion of “aura” concerns works of art, I think it can apply to a memorial site as well. See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 222–23. Holding an exhibition about horror at the site where the horror took place gives it an “authenticity” it would lose in a different setting. And although museums would generally be considered a form through which aura is lost, the “site museum” is an exception. “Site museums” are one classification of museums in China, and there are even volumes devoted to their study. See, e.g., Yizhi bowuguan xue gailun (General discussions of the study of site museums) (Xian: Shanxi Renmin, 1999).
[52] Young, Texture of Memory, 119.
[53] The term “mood of memory” comes from Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 168.
[54] Upon entering the museum, the spectator is given an identification card upon which is the name and life story of a real Holocaust victim. The exhibits, especially those on the second level of the building, give a sensation of the Holocaust. Philip Gourevitch has written that “violence and the grotesque are central to the American aesthetic, and the Holocaust Museum provides both amply. It is impossible to take in the exhibition without becoming somewhat inured to the sheer graphic horror on display; indeed, it would be unbearable to be defenseless in such a place. A flat response, however, is less unsettling than is the potential for excitement, for titillation, and even seduction by the overwhelmingly powerful imagery. The museum courts the viewer's fascination, encouraging familiarity with the incomprehensible and the unacceptable; one is repeatedly forced into the role of a voyeur of the prurient.” See Philip Gourevitch, “Behold Now Behemoth: The Holocaust Memorial Museum—One More American Theme Park,” Harper's Magazine (July 1993).
[55] See the website.
[56] Bells in Chinese culture represent atonement of sins and enlightenment. Both significances are at play here.
[57] E.g., two large photographs, one of mountains, one of a river, begin the Comprehensive Exhibit of the War of Resistance Museum discussed above.
[58] This position on the international nature of the War of Resistance was made “official” in September 2005 in statements by Hu Jintao commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the victory of the war.
[59] Wang's work has been primarily in stage design, but his company has also been involved in wax displays for Beijing's China Wax Figures Museum and Dalian's Gold Wax Figures Museum. The former is a temporary exhibit in the National Museum of China.
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