The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 5 | Issue 10 | Oct 01, 2007

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Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity: Negotiating theMemory of Japanese Imperialism in Chinese Museums

Kirk A. Denton

Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity:Negotiating the Memory of JapaneseImperialism in Chinese Museums

Kirk A. Denton

Abstract

This essay explores representations of Japaneseimperialism and war in museums of thePeople’s Republic of China. With the post-Maoreforms, there has been a general trend in suchrepresentations toward an emphasis on atrocityand victimization and away from the narrativesof heroic resistance that dominated in the Maoera. Yet, the museum curators in thesemuseums must negotiate between these tworepresentations in trying to make the warrelevant to a young audience generally moreattracted to the pleasures of popular culturethan history museums.

Any historical narrative is founded as much onforgetting as it is on remembering, and thenarrative of resistance and liberation that iscentral to the mythology of the Chinesecommunist revolution in the People’s Republicof China (PRC) has forgotten much—mostobviously the role of the Nationalists inresistance and, especially in light of new formsof memory that have emerged in the post-Maoliberalization, Japanese atrocities. Even before1949, the lef t ist pol i t ical world wasuncomfortable with representations ofJapanese atrocities. Ken Sekine has argued that

Ah Long’s Nanjing (completed 1939), perhapsthe first novel to deal in some detail with theNanjing Massacre, was suppressed because itsnarrative did not fit neatly the heroic mode ofliterature being promoted in Chongqing duringthe war.[1] After 1949, in an effort to build animage of a strong and unif ied nation,propaganda and party historiographyemphasized the heroic victory of the war andthe subsequent revolut ion. War andrevolutionary martyrs were worshipped fortheir noble sacrifice to the nation, but victimsof atrocities—the “rape of Nanjing” or themedical experiments led by the infamous Unit731 of the Japanese Imperial Army—did not fitwell this prevailing heroic narrative.

Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre wasconsciously suppressed during the Maoistperiod.[2] Mark Eykholt explains that in thepostrevolutionary period there was an officialsilence about the Nanjing Massacre and otherforms of Japanese atrocities because of a desireto promote national pride and, in the lateryears of the Cultural Revolution, of a fear oflosing much needed Japanese economicassistance.[3] References to the NanjingMassacre that appeared during the Maoist erawere motivated by a desire to make theNationalists in Taiwan look bad. Ian Burumasuggests two reasons for this Maoist silenceabout Japanese atrocities.[4] First, there wereno Communists in the Nationalist capital whenthe massacre occurred; almost all the soldierswho died in Nanjing were Nationalists. Second,Buruma argues that the eventual emergence ofnarratives of atrocities and victimization in thepost-Mao period has something to do withgenerations: Those who suffer real historical

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trauma tend to want to forget it; it is the nextgeneration, removed from the actual suffering,that does the remembering and develops whathe calls a “pseudoreligion of victimhood.”[5]Finally, the United States government, whichsupported the Japanese postwar regime andallowed the emperor to maintain his position, isalso implicated in the silence surroundingJapanese atrocities during the war.[6]

In the PRC, Deng Xiaoping’s economic reformprogram and the liberalization in arts andculture undermined the very ideology withwhich Chinese on the mainland had identifiedfor three decades, space was opened for newforms of remembering the past and new formsof social identification.[7] In the immediateaftermath of the Cultural Revolution, theWounds (shanghen) trend in literature, film,and art init iated a general culture ofvictimhood in China. In the 1980s, historiansand journalists such as Dai Qing critiquedelements of the revolutionary past onceconsidered sacred and untouchable.[8]

In more recent years, the fast-paced marketeconomy has forged a world that is radically atodds with the ideals embodied in standardrevolutionary history. In a world in whichentrepreneurship is glorified and trendyproducts define one’s identity—in the urbanworld of “bobos” and “neo-tribes”[9]—therevolutionary values of self-sacrifice andnational collective spirit ring hollow and false.And yet, in a market economy in which migrantworkers are treated as second-class citizens,peasants live in abject poverty, and the divisionbetween rich and poor is gaping, the classstruggle message of revolutionary history ispotentially threatening to the new stateideology. Forms of memory that downplay classstruggle and emphasize national unity throughshared suffering serve the state well in a newconsumer economy founded on classdistinction. Depictions of Japanese atrocitiesare morally unambiguous and serve to directdivisive class resentments toward an external

other; national unity and shared nationalsentiment grow out of this “othering” of Japan.When China ’s economy and cu l tureincreasingly merged with the global and its“identity” became murkier, a nationalistreaction was almost inevitable. As the state’sfunction shifts to facilitating transnationalcapital, the nation-building function falls intoother hands. Arif Dirlik puts it this way: “WhereWorld War II is concerned, memories of thepast serve to promote nationalism that,weakened in organization by developments incapitalism, finds in the realm of culture andpast existence a means both to perpetuate andto preserve a contemporary status quo that isvery much in jeopardy.”[10]

Since the 1990s, the discourse surrounding theWar of Resistance has shifted away from theplace of Japanese imperialism in the temporalnarrative of liberation and nation-state buildingtoward an obsessive attention to China’svictimization at the hands of the Japanese;tragic tales of horror are displacing, though byno means replacing, the heroic narrative ofresistance. Peter Gries has detected, in popularhistoriography and other forms of intellectualdiscourse in the PRC, a shift from a “victornarrative” to a “victim narrative” that tookplace from the 1980s to the 1990s, though he iscareful to show that the two can sometimescoexist uneasily.[11] This attention tovictimization serves more than just nationalistpurposes; it has ethical and economicimplications. China seeks a kind of moral upperhand in Asia in its economic and politicalcompetition with Japan; it wants to offer amodel for a third kind of economic developmentin Asia, and its history of Japanese imperialism,which it shares with many other Asian nations,helps legitimize its leadership. The Chinesegovernment’s desire to assert an economic andpolitical leadership position in Asia emergedclearly in the spring 2005 conflict over Japan’sascension to the UN Security Council. As onecommentator put it, the tensions betweenChina and Japan over history may have “to do

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more with the future than the past.”[12]

Museums and memorials have played animportant role in this move toward a discourseof victimization. In this essay, I look at fourimportant museums / memorial sites devoted toJapanese imperialism and to atrocitiescommitted by the imperial army: Memorial Hallof the People’s War of Resistance Against Japan(Zhongguo renmin kangRi zhanzhengjinianguan), Memorial to Victims of the NanjingMassacre by Japanese Invaders (QinHua RijunNanjing datusha yunan tongbao jinianguan),Crime Evidence Exhibition Hall of JapaneseImperial Army Unit 731 (QinHua Rijun diqisanyao budui zuizheng chenlieguan), andSeptember 18 History Museum (Jiuyiba lishibowuguan).[13] All four museums wereestablished in the 1980s and 1990s. In theiremphasis on atrocity and horror, they presentsomething that is new in the exhibitionaryrepresentation of Japanese imperialism inChina and constitute an important dimension inthe larger new remembering of World War IIand the gradual shift away from narratives inwhich class struggle plays a key role. With theiremphasis on atrocity, these museums fit looselyinto Gries’s victim narrative, and they are atleast partly the product of the rise ofneonationalism in the PRC and particularly ofthe anti-Japanese strain of nationalism.[14]

“Not forgetting” (wu wang) history, inparticular that aspect of history that is a sourceof “national humiliation” (guo chi), is a themefound throughout these museums. Thehistorical overview section of the War ofResistance Museum, for example, ends withZhou Enlai’s famous phrase “to not forget thepast is to be master of the future” (qian shi buwang, hou shi zhi shi).[15] The phrase appearsagain at the very beginning of the Unit 731Museum. Admonitions to “not forget” historyframe the September 18 History Museum. “Notforgetting national humiliation” is a commontheme in modern Chinese culture dating backat least to the Republ ican era, when

intellectuals urged others to recall thememories of humiliation, particularly thatinflicted by Japanese imperialism.[16] In the1990s, intellectuals and the state conspired in asimilar fashion to urge average Chinese not toforget national humiliation because peoplewere indeed forgetting.[17]

National humiliation is a powerful emotionalhook with which to bring citizens back into thenationalist fold from which the experiences oftheir daily lives in a harsh economic climatemay be leading them away. Paul Cohen writes:

In the final decade of the twentiethcentury, the problem with respectto the remembering of nationalhumiliation assumed yet anotherguise. For the great majority ofChinese at the century’s end thehumiliations of the past were nolonger a matter of immediate,personal experience. Since animportant source of legitimationfor China’s ruling Communist Partywas its part in the vanquishing ofimperialism in the 1940s—and theclosure this brought to thec o u n t r y ’ s “ c e n t u r y o fhumiliation”—the challenge facingpatriotic educators, in the climateof revived nationalistic feeling andweakened faith in Communism thatcharacterized the 1990s, was to fillthe minds of the young withnarratives of the suffering andhumiliation of the imperialistinterval in China’s history andentreat them to “not forget.”I n d e e d , “ d o n o tforget”—wuwang—became themantra of the guochi writing ofthis decade.[18]

In short, the obsessive attention to “notforgetting” suggests the past’s fall into

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oblivion. The heroic revolutionary past isincreasingly at odds with the lives of urbanresidents caught up in the struggles of themarket economy. The emotionality of atrocitiesis one way the state can forge nationalcohesion without stressing the potentiallysubversive message of revolutionary classstruggle that was until very recently so centralto its legitimizing myths.[19]

With the decline of the narrative of revolution,which dominated many museums in Maoist andear ly post -Mao t imes, new modes ofidentification are taking its place. JamesEdward Young writes that memorials andmonuments—museums could be easily added tothis list—are used by the state to “create acommon memory, as a foundation for a unifiedpolis.”[20] State memory and individualmemory converge, and the individual is madeto feel at a deeply personal level a unity withthe national community. The museums Ianalyze here clearly participate in thisemotionally charged state-sponsorednationalism. The emotional dimension is notentirely missing from other kinds of museumsin earlier modes of exhibitions, but it seemsclear that in their emphasis on the suffering ofthe Chinese body there is a shift with thesemuseums toward affective response. Thesemuseums fuel nationalist sentiment, and thetrauma of the past gets channeled toward anenemy and expressed in patriotic rage. Themuseums link together lost territory and thephysical suffering of the Chinese body politic.This specular attention to the suffering of one’sfellow Chinese is a hook the state can use to“create a common memory, as a foundation fora unified polis.” As such, these museums arepart of a larger move in museums of modernhistory in the PRC away from messages of classstruggle (or the unity of class struggle andnational resistance), which can potentially beturned against the state in the context ofmarket reforms and the reemergence of classdivis ions, toward more national ist icthemes.[21] In recent years, the idea of a

common memory of resistance to Japan hasbeen used to forge historical links betweenTaiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland andthereby draw attention to their shared identityand political destiny. In the fall of 2005, theNational Museum of China put on the much-publicized Exhibition on the Anti-JapaneseResistance Struggle of Our Taiwan Compatriots(Taiwan tongbao kangri douzheng zhanlan) (fig.1), and the place of Taiwan resistance is muchmore prominent in the 2005 renovated exhibitat the War of Resistance Memorial Hall than itwas in the museum’s previous exhibit.

Sign at the entranceway of the Anti-Japanese Resistance Struggle of OurTaiwan Compatriots exhibit, held at theNational Museum of China in 2005

But victimization, emphasis on “not forgetting,”and national cohesion through sentiment areperhaps inadequate as framing devices throughwhich to fully account for the emergence ofthese museums and this exhibitionary mode ofvisualizing horror and atrocities. The memoryof Japanese imperialism and atrocitiespresented in these museums is more complexand the influences on it more multiple. Caughtas they are between official (state), popular,and global museum forces, it is not surprisingthat these museums sometimes presentconflicted views. To emphasize atrocity andvictimization is a way to gain more legitimacyfor the nation in its continued struggle with

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Japan over the past, as Gries argues, as well asover present economic might in Asia. Yet thediscourse of victimization suggests a view ofthe Chinese people as passive and powerless, aview that does not sit well with present Chinesepretensions to national greatness. Moreover,overemphasizing victimization can serve toundermine CCP narratives of nationalresistance, which continue to be importantparts of mainstream representations of therevolutionary past. The heroic resistancemodel, conversely, ties in with a view ofChinese national character as strong, but italso suggests an outmoded ideology irrelevantto China’s globalizing present and future.Museums devoted to Japanese imperialismmust find ways to negotiate between thesediscourses.

Museum curators also struggle to balance theintegrity of their exhibitions with newtechnologies that are also vehicles for thevibrant popular culture in the world outside themuseum walls and that bring with them newmodes of spectatorship and relationships withhistory. From the perspective of museumcurators, the emphasis on atrocities and horrorin these museums is perhaps motivated asmuch by a need to accommodate popularculture as by victim narratives and anti-Japanese nationalism. Atrocities make for goodvisual copy, allowing museums to compete withpopular culture for the minds—and yuan—ofthe people. Atrocities offer a kind of voyeuristicpleasure to visitors that may not be unlike thatof watching horror films. In these museums,the archival and documentary impulse,exhibited through “authentic artifacts” andphotographs , competes wi th newertechnologies designed to popularize themessage. Drawing from Susan Sontag, wemight suggest that museums of Japaneseatrocities serve ultimately to numb the sensesto horror, creating a need for even greatervisual stimulation.[22] The modern Chinesewriter Lu Xun (1881–1936) would no doubtconcur; like the morally indifferent spectators

of the execution in the slide that changed hiscareer, visitors to museums of horror mightderive pleasure from the viewing of suffering.Popular and visual culture would seem to haveled museums inevitably toward emphasizingvisual depictions of horror and its pleasures.

The remembering and re-remembering ofWorld War II are, of course, not somethingpeculiar to the PRC; it is a vast internationalenterprise. Ken Burns’s recently broadcast filmdocumentary, The War, is but the tip of theiceberg of a mammoth industry of recollectingthe war in the West. Museums and memorials i t e s a re an impor tan t pa r t o f t h i sremembering. There are, for instances,hundreds of museums worldwide devoted tothe Holocaust.[23] Many more offer overviewsof the war (e.g., the National World War IIMuseum, New Orleans), commemorate specificbattles (e.g., Museum of the Battle of theBulge, La Roche, Belgium), or offer alternativememories of the war (e.g., Japanese AmericanNational Museum, Los Angeles). The newmemories of the war in the PRC must be seenalso in the larger context of the “newremembering” of the war throughout Asia,where political changes have opened up spacefor new forms of representing the war.[24] InHong Kong, for example, perhaps bothinfluenced by trends on the mainland andmotivated by a new-found sense of local pride,museums and memorial sites, such as theMuseum of Coastal Defence, have recentlyemphasized in their exhibits Hong Kong’sheroic resistance against the Japanese,particularly that of the Hong Kong-KowloonIndependent Company (aka Dongjiang GuerillaForce) and the Hong Kong Volunteers. InTaiwan, the question of resistance during thewar is closely intertwined with identity politics.Exhibitions that take a KMT Sino-centricapproach (e.g., National Military Museum inTaipei) tend to emphasize resistance activities;those that lean toward the DPP and its notionsof Taiwanese identity (e.g., February 28Museum in Taipei) tend to have a much more

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favorable view of Japanese occupation andtherefore place less stress on resistance.

Chinese atrocity museums and their exhibitionsare i n f l uenced by g l oba l t r ends i nmemorializing the past,[25] and in particular byHolocaust museums and the global rise ofvictimization narratives, as well as by changesin how World War II is being rememberedglobally. Buruma points out that at least someof the impetus behind recent PRC rememberingof Japanese atrocities has been spurred byefforts in the Chinese diaspora community,especially in the United States.[26] There iscertainly evidence to suggest that Chinesemuseum and memorial designers and curatorswere highly conscious of the precedent ofHolocaust museums and thought of theirprojects in terms of global remembering ofhuman tragedies. Qi Kang, for instance,compares his design of the Nanjing MassacreMuseum to Holocaust museums in theWest.[27] The editor of a book about the Unit731 Crimes Evidence Exhibition Hall links theNanjing Massacre, Auschwitz, and the activitiesof Unit 731.[28] This linking of atrocities onChinese soil with those committed in NaziGermany suggests a way out of the bind thathas characterized Chinese views of Japaneseatrocities.[29] That horror has occurredelsewhere and that this horror is memorializedin museums around the world somehow makesit all right for Chinese to make public thisshameful chapter in their past. It also giveslegitimacy to their historical claims vis-à-visJapanese denials: If it is not acceptable to denythe Holocaust, it is also not acceptable forpeople to deny the Nanjing Massacre or theexperiments at Unit 731.

Victimization narratives are thus not unique toChina. “In a curious way,” writes Ian Buruma,“the Jewish Holocaust has been an inspirationfor others. For almost every community, be it anation or a religious or ethnic or sexualminority, has a bone to pick with history. Allhave suffered wrongs, and to an increasing and

in my view alarming extent, all want thesewrongs to be recognized, publicly, ritually, andsometimes financially.”[30] In short, theemergence of atrocity museums and thememory of suffering must be looked at notso le ly in terms o f the emergence o fneonationalism and victim narratives; equallysignificant in shaping the memory of this pastare global trends in museology and thechanging technology of museum display and itsrelation to popular culture.

Mao Era Museums and Their Treatment ofthe War of Resistance Against Japan

To set the context for appreciating the post-Mao changes in how the War of ResistanceAgainst Japan is represented, it might behelpful to first see how the war was depicted inthe Mao-era in general and Mao-era museumsin particular. The war played a key role in thenarrative of the communist revolutionpropagated in the PRC. The war years havebeen portrayed as the pivotal period in therevolutionary movement that allowed theChinese Communist Party (CCP) to emergefrom the shadows and become a legitimateclaimant to political hegemony in China. Andbecause Mao Zedong wrote most of histheoretical works during the war, the period(as well as the place where the party spentmost of it—Yan’an) has also been presented asthe sacred origins of Mao Zedong Thought,which dominated the ideological realm of thePRC from its founding in 1949 to Mao’s deathin 1976. During the war itself, rhetoric ofresistance to Japan gave the CCP legitimacy inits struggle for political control with theNationalist Party. In the postrevolutionaryperiod, the war occupied a critical place in CCPnarratives of modern Chinese history—as thedenouement, if you like, in the transformationfrom feudal darkness and imperialisthumiliation to enlightenment and nationalsovereignty, the war was central to shaping theparty’s role in the liberational tale that was keyto its legitimizing mythology.[31]

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The centrality of the war period is apparent in avariety of cultural forms, perhaps mostobviously films.[32] But one need go no furtherthan the Chinese national anthem to find theimportance of the war to CCP legitimizingnarratives.[33] Although written in 1935 beforethe outbreak of the war, the song wassomething of a rallying cry for nationalresistance during the war. As the nationalanthem in the postrevolutionary period, itexpresses both “liberation” rhetoric (“you whorefuse to be slaves”) and the theme of “unity”in the struggle for national sovereignty(“millions of hearts with one mind”). The warbecomes, in these and other examples, thepivotal period in the narrative of liberation andthe establishment of a national polity.[34]

In the Military Museum and the Museum of theChinese Revolution (both developed in the late1950s and opened to the public in 1961), thewar constitutes an important stage in thelarger story of the victory of the revolution. Inthese representations, the war is a pivotalperiod in the history of the revolutionarymovement because it led to the emergence ofthe CCP as the legitimate political force on thenational scene. Atrocities are displayed, butthey occupy a very minor part in the largernarrative, which is centered on the role of theCCP, battles in which its armies engaged, andthe CCP-led popular resistance.

Typical of Maoist museum and memorialrepresentations of the war is the NortheastMartyrs Memorial Hall.

Front façade of the Northeast MartyrsMemorial Hall

Founded in 1948, it is perhaps the oldest suchmemorial hall in the PRC. It celebrates thesacrifices of those who lost their lives in theNortheast theater of the struggle against theJapanese. Until i ts recent closing forrenovation, the museum comprised two mainsections, one devoted to the War of Resistanceand the other to the War of Liberation (i.e., civilwar with the Nationalists). To my knowledge, itdid not touch on atrocities such as the medicalexperiments committed by Unit 731 orbiological warfare. Rather, it emphasized thestruggle of heroic martyrs such as Yang Jingyu,Zhao Yiman, and Li Zhaolin. When I visited inthe summer of 2004, the museum’s basicexhibit (jiben chenlie) was closed because of aplanned renovation.[35] In its place was atemporary exhibit that gives a brief overview ofthe Northeast theater during the War ofResistance. This temporary exhibit offers asense of what the former basic exhibit musthave looked like. It strongly emphasizes theresistance narrative and the heroic sacrifices ofrevolutionary and patriotic martyrs. It ends ona celebratory note, with paintings and bronzereliefs devoted to liberation and “turning over”(fanshen).In the basement of the museum, however, wasa new temporary exhibit called Crimes in theLight of Day: The Chemical Warfare Crimes of

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the Invading Japanese Army. The specialexhibit was filled with gruesome photographsof piles of dead children, severed heads, andbodies disfigured by gas attacks.

One of many photographs depicting thehorrific consequences of Japanesechemical weapons in a special exhibit inthe Northeast Martyrs Memorial Hall,Harbin

The language of the placards is emotional. Forexample, the title of the second part of theexhibit is Diabolical Evil, Madness Enacted(qiongxiong ji’e, fengkuang shishi). The exhibitends with the exhortation: “Don’t forgetnational humiliation, revitalize China” (wuwangguochi, zhenxing Zhonghua), set on a collage ofimages of a strong industrial and militaryChina.[36] The example of the NortheastMartyrs Memorial Hall shows us two modes ofnarrating Japanese imperialism: an oldernarrative that stresses the glorious memory ofresistance and heroic sacrifice; and a newnarrative of horror, atrocity, and victimizationthat is explicitly connected to China’s future asa strong nation.

Memorial Hall of the People’s War ofResistance Against the Japanese

The Memorial Hall of the Chinese People’sResistance Against Japan (hence, War of

Resistance Museum) shows perhaps mostprominently this same tension between theheroic resistance and horror and victimizationnarratives. The museum is situated in Wanpingnear the famous Lugou Bridge (referred to inEnglish as the Marco Polo Bridge).[37] Themuseum was constructed in three stages (firststage completed in 1987, second stage in1997). A third transformation, in honor of thesixtieth anniversary of the victory of the war,took place over the summer of 2005. Contraryto what I expected, the new exhibit, entitledGreat Victory, downplays atrocity and places anew emphasis on the war as a key part of thelarger global anti-fascist struggle; the war thusbecomes a pivotal period in China’s emergenceas a global power.[38] I focus here are on theexhibitions during the museum’s second stage.Because it is directly under the auspices of theCentral Committee and the City of Beijing, themuseum has solid financial backing and hasbecome something of a national center forremembering the War of Resistance as well asfor the promotion, somewhat ironically, of Sino-Japanese friendship.

In its second phase, the museum consisted offive principal exhibits. First are comprehensiveexhibits, which present a chronological historyof Japanese imperialism in China and Chineseresistance to it; these exhibits constitute thelargest part of the museum and are displayed inseveral halls divided into multiple exhibitionspaces . The s ty le o f d i sp lay here i sconventional, with photographs, texts, andartifacts used to tell a chronological narrativeof imperialism and resistance. Second is theJapanese Army Atrocities exhibit, whichincludes displays on the Nanjing Massacre, useof poisonous gas, and medical experiments.Here the mode of exhibition emphasizesdioramas and recreated scenes. Third are thePeople’s War exhibits, showing the heroicresistance of the Chinese people, with an actualtunnel simulating “tunnel warfare.” Fourth isthe Battle for Lugou Bridge diorama hall. Andfifth is the Anti-Japanese Martyrs exhibit. The

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spectator is generally expected to view theexhibits in this prescribed order.

The museum shows elements of both the victorand victim narratives, but they are generallytreated separately, suggesting the difficulty thecurators faced in integrating them into acoherent whole. The Japanese Army Atrocitiesexhibit is primarily in the victim mode, whereasthe v ic tor narra t i ve dominates thecomprehensive exhibits and the People’s Warexhibit. The museum is thus fundamentallydivided between a conventional emphasis onthe CCP’s heroic resistance to Japaneseimperialism and an attention to atrocities andto suffering of the physical body. Thecomprehensive exhibits present a ratherconventional view of the history of Japaneseimperialism and Chinese resistance. To be sure,as Mitter discusses in detail, these exhibitsdiffer from previous representations of the warin drawing attention to the Nationalist role andthe role of overseas Chinese, emphasizing inthe process patriotism above political ideology;but the CCP’s role still dominates thisrepresentation.[39] The exhibit opens with aprefatory text set between ceiling-to-floor sizephotographs, one of the raging Yellow River,the other of a misty mountain scene—signifiers,clearly, of Chinese national territory. In theexhibits proper, the main narrative thread isthat of CCP resistance, with large photos ofMao in his cave in Yan’an, oil paintingsglorifying the CCP-led Hundred RegimentsCampaign, and exhibits on the “people’sresistance.”

The People’s War exhibit resonates stronglywith the Maoist narrative, exemplified in LinBiao’s tract referred to at the beginning of thischapter. It emphasizes the primary role of theCCP in establishing bases of resistance, as wellas the unity of the party with the people. Thereis a large, nearly life-size diorama of a northernvillage, presented as a typical setting for the“tunnel warfare” played up so much in Mao-erafilms and fiction. There are life-size figures

digging tunnels as well as a model of a peasanthome that leads to a secret tunnel spectatorscan walk through. Another exhibit glorifies theresistance of the CCP troops in the Baiyangdianarea of Hebei. As a whole, the exhibitsymbolizes the cooperation between the partyand the people in resistance to the Japanese—astandard CCP representation of the war period.What is different from earlier Maoistrepresentations, of course, is that the museumlacks an emphasis on the foundationalinfluence of Mao Zedong Thought, the third ofthe characteristics of the war outlined by LinBiao in 1965. The exhibit ends, predictably,with a collage of photos showing celebrationsof “the great victory of the people’s war.”

By contrast, the Japanese Army AtrocitiesExhibit is dominated by several life-sizedioramas of atrocities. One presents a three-dimensional scene of the bloodied bodies ofwomen and children set before a large muraldepicting a battlefield strewn with bodiesextending far into the distance.

Exhibition space in the Japanese ArmyAtrocities Hall

In the foreground, the diorama highlights a livechild sitting up on the body of his dead mother.A commonplace in Ch inese museumrepresentations of horror, the severing of themost basic human bond between mother andchild becomes the emotional hook to draw thespectator in. The exhibit also has a gruesomelife-size diorama of white-coated Japanesedoctors performing medical experiments on

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Chinese bodies that twitch mechanically. Apartfrom these eye-catching and dramatic scenes,the exhibit is composed primarily of huge,blown-up photographs giving testimony toJapanese atrocities. The displays drawattention to physical suffering and are meant toprovoke emotional responses, including pityand a sense of outrage.

The Battle for Lugou Bridge diorama hall is asmall theater with stadium seating. On thecurved “screen” in the background is a hugepainting of the Lugou Bridge area. In theforeground is a three-dimensional battlefieldscene. This is the setting for a twenty-minuteshow that makes use of recorded narration,lights, and sound effects to bring the battle tolife. These sorts of multimedia scenes areincreasingly popular in Chinese museums, butthis was, to my knowledge, the first. Themuseum curators developed it quite self-consciously as a response to the popularity,liveliness, and emotive power of other media,particularly television and film. It should besaid that this incursion of popular culturalmodes into the exhibitionary practice of thismuseum is rather limited in comparison withother museums, such as the ShanghaiMunicipal History Museum or even theSeptember 18 History Museum. Moreover, thecurators have limited this mode of exhibition tothe diorama hall, the Japanese Army AtrocitiesExhibit, and the People’s War Exhibit; thecomprehensive exhibits, which one could argueare the museum’s basic exhibits, are far moreconventional and academic, and the MartyrsExhibit is vastly more solemn.

The Martyrs Exhibit, which is visually distinctfrom the rest of the museum, has a religiousaura about it. It consists of one large circularroom, which one enters through an openvestibule. The vestibule presents four carvedreliefs of battle scenes, two on the left and twoon the right. As Mitter notes, among the reliefsare a depiction of the five heroes of LangyaMountain, a standard object of worship in CCP

historiography, and the heroic Nationalistdefense of Haibaoshan. This acknowledgementof Nationalist patriotism in resistance to Japanmarks, argues Mitter, a “radical departure frompre-1985 PRC interpretations of the war” andreflects an official state policy of reconciliationtoward Taiwan.[40] Yet the ideological use ofmartyrs for nationalism and national unity isconsistent with Maoist myth making. Thecircular memorial hall has at its center abronze statue of an unknown soldier, whosefallen body is at once pulled to the great earthand struggling to prop itself up with a gun.[41]

Unknown soldier in the center of theMartyrs Memorial Hall in the War ofResistance Museum outside Beijing

This centerpiece coveys something of theambiguity of the martyr image in Chineserevolutionary iconography: at once a victim ofoppression and a heroic resister who strugglesagainst that oppression, drawn toward death,the past, and the earth, but lifting himselftoward life, the sublime, and the future.Martyrs are tied to the past, a memory of thatpast, but they are also guiding spirits for thefuture. The statue of the unknown soldier thusembodies the larger tension in the museum’sexhibitions between the victory and victimnarratives.

Surrounding this statue are fourteen redmarble memorial steles (representing thefourteen years, from 1931 to 1945, ofresistance to Japan). Below a wreath in relief atthe top of the stele are written the names of

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martyrs—mostly soldiers who died during thewar, including such CCP-canonized figures asZhao Yiman, but also including Nationalistsoldiers—along with a brief biography. At thebase of each stele is a carving in white marbleof an open book containing more names ofmartyrs. Its circular structure and polishedmarble floor, and the earthy tones of the stelesand the central statue, give the hall a warm yetdignified feel. The carving of the names ofmartyrs on the polished marble steles recallsthe V ie tnam Veterans ’ Memor ia l inWashington, but the circular windowless roomcreates an enclosed aesthetic that is verydifferent from the open-ended, open-airaesthetic of Maya Lin’s memorial. As spectatorsenter the hall they are enveloped by the namesof the martyrs and the memory of their heroicsacrifice. Despite the earthy color of themarble, the overall effect of the hall is colderthan the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, lackingthe personal dimension that has given thatmemorial its power. But the memorial hallcreates a very serious and somber mood thatreflects the kinds of memories the curators nodoubt seek to instill in spectators. Whereas theexhibits proper present “documentation” of thepast, the Martyrs Memorial Hall asks for a kindof religious reverence and remembrance ofthose who have sacrificed their lives.

Significantly, the memorial hall commemoratesnot the victims of the Nanjing Massacre orother atrocities but the heroic fighters againstJapanese imperialism. The museum concludesnot with the victims of atrocities but with aconventional reverence for the heroes ofnational resistance. It opens with a similarlyheroic and threatening image: a massivebronze relief of soldiers and others whoresisted Japanese aggression tellingly titledBuild Our New Great Wall with Our Flesh andBlood (Ba women de xue rou zhucheng womenxinde changcheng), a line from the Chinesenational anthem.

Bas relief in the entrance hall of the Warof Resistance Museum

Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall:Remembering Horror

The appearance of the Nanjing MassacreMemorial Hall should be understood in thelarger context of post-Mao liberalization andthe emergence of new narratives of nationalidentity and nationalism. The idea for amuseum dedicated to the Nanjing Massacredates back to 1983 and was clearly the result ofinterest in the topic at the highest levels ofstate government.[42] Qi Kang, a Nanjing-based architect who has made a name forhimself designing museums and memorials,was the principal designer of the memorial site.The first part of the museum was completed in1985 and included the main exhibition hall andthe “graveyard grounds.” In 1997, the site wasexpanded to include a new L-shapedentranceway that created a southern-facinggate and added several impressive sculpturesto the memorial site. The site will soon undergoa $59 million expansion, to be completed in2007.

Qi Kang sought to create what he calls a“holistic environmental design” (zhengtihuanjing sheji) rather than a conventionalmuseum building filled with historical artifacts.His goal was to use a “solemn language”

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(shenchen de yuyan) to elicit emotion, and hestates that the design was meant to create an“ e m o t i o n a l s p a c e ” ( y o u g a n j u e d ekongjian).[43] At the same time as he wasworking on the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, QiKang was designing the Yuhuatai Memorial,a l so in Nanj ing . Whereas the la t termemorializes heroic fighters for a noble cause,the former remembers helpless victims ofatrocity and therefore required, says Qi, a verydifferent aesthetic.[44] The symmetry andgrand design of the Yuhuatai site convey astrong tenor of the heroic and sublime, and inthat sense is similar in kind, though not indesign, to conventional Maoist memorial sitesfor martyrs, for which the national model is theMonument to the People’s Heroes in Beijing.

Main hall at Yuhuatai Martyrs Park inNanjing

By contrast, the Nanjing Massacre site isasymmetrical and earthbound: There are notowering steles that soar heroically to the sky;it has a more minimalist design that self-consciously seeks to avoid grand architecturalgestures of the sublime.

The memorial’s aesthetic is somber andpurposefully bleak and lifeless.[45] Nearly theentire memorial—walls, ground, steps, and thelike—is done in cinderblock, presenting auniformly drab color. Qi says he sought to givethe feeling of “entering a tomb.” Tragedy andhorror are not represented directly butsuggested subtly through the stark aesthetic.

The memorial is radically different fromanything done before it in the PRC. This may ofcourse have something to do with the topic;heroic resistance or grand sacrifice, socommonly heralded in revolutionary historymuseums and memorials to martyrs, are justnot appropriate for a memorial devoted toatrocity, and Qi Kang’s strove to find anappropriate aesthetic to capture the horror.[46]There is little that is grand or heroic in thedesign of the outdoor memorial space; instead,perhaps influenced by Holocaust museums inthe West, it conveys a bleak and desolate lookthat is powerful and moving.

The memorial is constructed on the site of amass grave of victims that was unearthed in theearly 1980s. It consists of three main sections:the L-shaped entranceway, the graveyardgrounds, and the history exhibit. As you enterthe square, a long courtyard leads to the site’smost impressive work of art, “Disaster in theAncient City” (Gucheng de zainan). In thebackground is an ancient city wall riddled withholes (as if from bullets and bombs). In theforeground is the half-buried body of a victim,his head severed from the rest of his body, ofwhich only an arm and hand are visible.

“Disaster in the Ancient City,” a sculptureat the end of the entrance courtyard in theNanjing Massacre memorial

Above his head looms a Japanese knife, redwith the blood of the victim below. Though the

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figure recalls similar sculptures at othermemorial sites—for instance, the unknownsoldier at the Longhua Martrys Park—it is amore despairing aesthetic. Cutting across theburied body of the statue is the “bridge ofhistory,” suggesting the horrors inflicted onChina by history, but also passage out frombeneath the burden of history. The bridgesuggests that remembering the past will lead toa better future, a constant theme in PRChistory museums and memorial sites. Thebridge leads to a courtyard with a sculpturetitled “The Footprints of Witnesses to History”(Lishi zhengren de jiaoyin), which consists ofbronze footprints of survivors of the massacre.To the right is a wall on which is inscribed inbronze a long narrative poem about themassacre titled “Crazy Snow” (Kuang xue),written by Wang Jiuxing. The sculpture andpoem were added to the memorial site in 2002and 2003, respectively.

Unknown soldier statue, Longhua MartyrsPark, Shanghai

The most powerful part of the site is thegraveyard grounds. Although the entire site hasa gray and bleak look, the graveyard ground isespecially so. There is no color and little in theway of greenery, except along the edges of thegrounds (which Qi says was intended to offerhope within despair). There is something of a

Zen garden aesthetic to the graveyard. Onecannot see the graveyard from the entrancesquare; it must be entered by first mountingsome stairs, above which is a sign that reads“300,000 Victims,” and walking through anelbow-shaped passageway formed bycinderblock walls to each side. At the end ofthe enclosed passageway, a vista slowly opensup to reveal a landscape of scorched pebblesinterrupted only by a few leafless trees and thestatue of a mother who appears to be searchingfor her child.[47] Along the edge of the field ofstones, the visitor follows a long stone relief,which forms a barrier between the graveyardand the outside world, depicting moments ofhorror suffered by Nanjing residents during themassacre. After passing by a memorial wall(labeled “The Crying Wall”) inscribed with thenames of victims, the path then leads throughtwo separate “bones” rooms—exhibits of actualbones of massacred victims found at the site.

Graveyard grounds at the NanjingMassacre memorial

The third and final section of the memorial siteis the historical exhibition, which is housed in ahalf-underground building and gives anoverview of Japanese imperialism in China andof the massacre itself. The exhibit opens with astatue titled “Mother and Child” (Mu yu zi),which shows a mother holding the limp body ofher dead child, a sacrificial victim of theslaughter, and harkens back to the Motherfigure in the graveyard grounds. The mother-child union is a powerful one, commonly usedin socialist iconography. Behind the figure is a

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large photographic mural of dead bodies, abovewhich looms the number “300,000.” Clearly,the use of mother and child as the openingimage of the exhibits is meant to suggest theinnocence of the victims as a whole and toreinforce the barbarity of the Japanese forsevering the most fundamental of all humanrelations.

The exhibition proper is presented, as are thevast majority of museum exhibitions in thePRC, in chronological order. It is framed quiteclearly with the nationalist message of Chinesestruggles against imperialism, which creates aninteresting tension with the aesthetic of themore humanist graveyard outside. Thehistorical exhibition sets the massacre in thelarger context of Japanese imperialism andChinese resistance to it, whereas the graveyardfocuses on human suffering and on instillingremembrance of that suffering. Thisschizophrenic quality of the memorial as awhole is expressed in the site’s name. The termyu’nanzhe (victim) gives a humanist sense ofuniversal victimization and suffering, but theuse of tongbao suggests at the same time thatthe memorial is still firmly within a nationalistparadigm. And although Buruma criticizes it fordemanding “piety of the Japanese andpatriotism from the Chinese” and for notoffering an “atmosphere in which dispassionatehistorical inquiry can thrive,” the memorialmarks a step away from the kind of heroicglorification of martyrs that dominated theMaoist period and continues to be an importantform of memorialization in the PRC.[48]Clearly, the state in China is not willing to giveup its control over memory of the past; the kindof postmodern memorial Buruma seems towant—one that questions the very notion ofrepresentation—would threaten that controland is unthinkable in the present politicalcontext.

Museums in China are often used as activesites for memorialization. This is especially trueof the Nanjing Massacre memorial. The day of

my visit to the museum was July 7, 2004;needless to say, special ceremonies were held,including personal oral narrations by livingwitnesses. Museums freeze time and suggestultimately the irretrievability of the past or thatthe past is an inert artifact; clearly, the activeuse to which museums are put in Chinaattempts to overcome these perhaps inherentweaknesses of the museum project. Althoughthis active use of memorial sites might suggest,like the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial inWashington, a kind of popular appropriation ofa state-sponsored memorial, the statemaintains control over how and when the site isused for public commemorations.[49]

The Unit 731 Museum: Authenticity

The Crime Evidence Exhibition Hall of theJapanese Imperial Army Unit 731 in Pingfang,Heilongjiang, was established in the early1980s in a building that is part of a much largersite used by the infamous Japanese Army Unit731 to commit medical experiments onthousands of Chinese (as well as someRussians, Koreans, and others) from 1939 tothe end of the War of Resistance AgainstJapan.[50] In 1995, a new building to house theexhibits was constructed down the road fromthis site. In 2001, however, the exhibit wasbrought back to the original site, nowrenovated.

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Entranceway, courtyard, and exhibitionhall of the Unit 731 Museum

Why did museum officials, after expendingfinancial capital and great effort in theconstruction of a new museum, decide toreturn the exhibit to the original site? The newmuseum, I contend, lacked the power andauthenticity of a site where the atrocitiesdescribed in the exhibits actually took place. Asa “site museum” (yizhi bowuguan), the presentmuseum gives the past an “aura” it never couldgain in a less charged setting.[51]

Much of the power of the museum comes evenbefore you enter the exhibition building. Fromthe main gate, you walk through a largeexpanse of greenless, empty space. Theemptiness seems to offer mental space for theimagination of the horrors to be displayed inthe museum exhibits. Its emptiness and sterilityrecall the memorial site at Auschwitz and arean example of James Young’s “memorializedruins”: “As houses come to be ‘haunted’ by theghosts (memory, really) of their formeroccupants, the sites of destruction are hauntedby the phantoms of past events, no longervisible, only remembered.”[52] Before evenentering the building, the site creates a “moodof memory,” a somber mood that prepares onefor the horror exhibited in the museumproper.[53]

Inside the exhibition building, which housedthe administrative offices of Unit 731, thismood is maintained by dark hallways andexposed-bricked rooms. As you enter thebuilding, there is a prefatory hallway that setsthe theme for the entire museum and memorialsite. On either side of the hallway are bronzereliefs, in which are carved large characters: tothe left, qian shi bu wang; and to the right, houshi zhi shi (to not forget the past is to bemaster of the future). As discussed previously,the recurring emphasis on recalling the past inChinese museum is all about moving beyondthe past so as to make China a “master” in the

future; recalling the horrors of the past is astep toward leaving behind the “century ofhumiliation” and marching toward a moreglorious future when that remembering willlonger be necessary. Implicitly, then,remembering humiliation is connected to theemergence of China as a global economic andpolitical power.

The “Preface” to the exhibits proper says thatthe experiments carried out by members ofUnit 731 make them “the cruelest fascist warcriminals in the history of humankind.” It givesthe f igure of 3,000 kil led by Unit 731experiments, and another 300,000 killed as aresult of germ warfare technology developed atthe site. “Our purpose,” says the preface, “inexposing the evil history of Unit 731 is to usefacts to warn later people, to allow history tocall for human peace, civilization, and progress,and not let historical tragedies repeatthemselves.”

The exhibits themselves are presented with adark aesthetic that creates a somber andserious mood. The thrust of the exhibits is topresent authentic artifacts so as to “let historygive testimony.” The museum generally makesless use of dioramas and multimedia than, say,the Museum of the War of Resistance or theSeptember 18 History Museum. Instead, itf a v o r s p h o t o g r a p h s a n d m a t e r i a lobjects—things that authenticate whathappened at the site—such as hangers forhuman viscera, laboratory test tubes, saws,scalpels, and clamps, as well as prisoneridentity cards. Much attention is paid to thetestimony of former members of Unit 731. Oneroom is devoted to “Confessions” (qianhui) ofvarious Japanese military figures, who in the1980s began to reveal the truth of Unit 731’sactivities in China.

There are graphic photographs in the museumto be sure, but for the most part the horror hasto be imagined from the artifacts. This may bea conscious choice on the part of the curators,

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but it may also be because photographs andfilm footage do not exist. As the exhibitsrecount repeatedly, the Japanese destroyedmuch of the Pingfang site at the end of the warin order to eliminate evidence of their crimes.The ruins, we are told in one museumcatalogue, are “evidence of the Japanesearmy’s germ warfare crimes, and evidence ofthe Japanese army’s destruction of evidence.”Graphic dioramas are few in the museum. Oneshows Japanese doctors performing medicalexperiments; another, called the ErdaogouPlague Scene, depicts a bubonic plague attackon the village of Erdaogou. The nearly life-sizediorama is in two parts, with the spectatorwalkway running between them: To the left is adead figure with two mourners by its side, anolder woman mourns from the door of theirhovel of a home; to the right a corpse is beingcarried away on a stretcher. The horror israther muted. The diorama ends with a list ofthe names of those known to have died in theattack.

In comparison with many other new museumsin China, multimedia is also used sparingly.There is, however, a small film auditorium,which continuously projects a documentaryabout Unit 731. On the wall of the auditorium iswritten “Do not forget national humiliation.”The film uses fictionalized scenes as well asdocumentary photos and is not easy viewing.When I visited the museum in the summer of2004, a young woman, a Korean I believe,suddenly ran out of the viewing room andvomited in the hallway.

Like some of the other museums discussedhere, the Unit 731 Museum has several exhibitsdevoted to memorialization. One room is called“Remember Us,” a kind of memorial hallconsisting of a plaster structure made to looklike stone with a flame cutting through it;below is a wreath and a plaque, which tells usthat the victims are mostly nameless. To theleft and right of the room are the names of fourknown victims. The final exhibit is a long

hallway, on the left side of which is the “List ofthe Victims.” There are plaques (in stone, withblack characters) for those nameable victims,extending down the length of the hall, someone hundred in total. The exhibit ends with textthat echoes the preface, saying that some 3,000died as a result of Unit 731 experiments andanother 300,000 were injured in germ warfareproduced from these experiments. The museumnot only serves to help the spectator rememberthe past but also emphasizes the need toremember and the remembering itself.

Behind the exhibition building are “ruins”—thefoundations of buildings that were part of thelarger Unit 731 complex.

Ruins of one of the structures on the Unit731 complex

There are, for example, the ruins of thebuilding used for germ research. The museumhas plans to develop these ruins into a moreintegral part of the site. At present, some of theruins surrounding the exhibition hall haveplaques informing the spectator about the site,but many still do not. As suggested above, thismuseum derives its power from the site and itsruins. Because of the power of the site, themuseum does not have to recreate anatmosphere, like the Holocaust MemorialMuseum in Washington, which seeks torecreate the feel of experiencing life in theconcentration camps.[54] This museum seems

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to self-consciously avoid a Disneyfication ofhorror and play up the authentic aura of itssite. The exhibits are simple, the lighting isdim, and the display is mundane, and all lackthe technological sophistication now oftenfound in Chinese museums. Although theseaspects may also be partly due to a lack offunds or of curatorial training, I think thecurators are self-consciously avoiding theaestheticization of objects that were used toinflict unimaginable suffering.

The September 18 History Museum:Specularity and Memory

The September 18 History Museum inShenyang was established in 1991 on thesixtieth anniversary of September 18, 1931,when the Japanese Kwantung Army blew up arailway bridge, accused the Chinese of doing it,and then used the incident as pretext foroccupying Shenyang and southern Manchuria.The date is conventionally seen in the PRC asthe beginning of the Japanese occupation ofChina and of resistance to it. In its early phase,the museum consisted of a single monument:the broken calendar monument, which I discussbelow. In 1997, the city of Shenyang approvedfunding for an expanded museum, and thepresent museum was completed two years laterand opened on September 18, 1999. As thecatalogue puts it, the museum seeks to be aplace for “patriotic and national defenseeducation” and to teach people “not to forgetnational humiliation and to invigorate China”(wu wang guochi, zhenxing Zhonghua). Likeother museums in China, this museum is activein educational outreach, organizing, forinstance, a mobile exhibition that travelsaround to schools.[55]

The museum building is among the moreinteresting architectural designs of newmuseums in the PRC.

Main exhibition hall of the September 18History Museum

It is situated outside the central core of the cityon the site of the explosion that was used bythe Japanese as a pretext for attackingShenyang and eventually occupying all ofManchuria. Unlike the Unit 731 Museum,however, the museum’s symbolic power doesnot derive particularly from the historical site.Instead, the building’s design and the use ofexternal space immediately around themuseum give it power. What first catches one’seye as one enters the main gate is the giantstone calendar, riddled with bullet and bombholes and opened to the date September 18,1931.

Stone calendar statue in the courtyard ofthe September 18 History Museum

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The text on the calendar reads: “Around teno’clock at night, the Japanese army blew up theLiutiao Lake section of the SouthernManchurian Railway. Under the pretext ofblaming the Chinese army for committing thisact, they attacked and occupied the army’snorth headquarters. Under orders not to resist,our northeast army retreated in pain, disasterbefell the nation, and the people rose upangrily in resistance.” Although it is intendedto stress the historical importance of this datein Chinese history, the calendar also suggeststhat time has stopped and that China issomehow stuck in the memory of this nationalinsult. However, by commemorating this tragicevent, the museum will help China to flip thepages of history forward and leave thehumiliation of that event behind.

Various pieces of sculpture appear around theplaza in front of the museum building. As at theNanjing Massacre memorial, there is large bellcalled the Awaken the World Bell (Jingshizhong); on one side of the bell are the words“do not forget national humiliation,” and adescription of the September 18 Incidentappears on the other.[56] A bomb stele (zhadanbei) shows what looks like a cement support, anoriginal piece of the Liaotiao Lake Bridge. Onthe facade of the museum building itself is ahuge relief in bronze called “National Disaster”(Guo nan ) , created by the sculptureDepartment of the Shenyang Lu Xun Fine ArtsAcademy. The placard informs one that therelief, which stretches along the white facadeof the wall of the museum, is inspired bytraditional Chinese calligraphy.

Indeed, from a distance, the movement of therelief along the wall does suggest sweepingdark brush strokes on white paper. Only closeto the relief can one notice figures of sufferingvictims of the Japanese attack embedded in thebronze.

Close-up of relief on the front exteriorwalls of the September 18 History Museum

The relief thus suggests, perhaps recallingMao’s phrase about the people being a blankslate, that the “people” emerge from writingitself; the people are the object/subject ofhistory/historiography. As in many suchrepresentations in history museums in China,bronze represents the earth and the people areshown to be part of the earth, tied to themotherland; territory and the body politic areinextricably joined. On the facade of the streetside of the building is another similar bronzerelief called “Anger Rising” (Fen qi), meant torepresent the spirit of resistance. It depictssoldiers heroically fighting the enemy.

Taken together, the two reliefs that cover themuseum’s outer walls represent the victim andvictory narratives discussed at the beginning ofthis chapter. The last important artworkoutside the museum is the “Memorial Stele ofthe Victory of the War of Resistance,” which in

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its shape hearkens back to the “bomb stele”near the entrance to the site; it restores to anupright position the bridge support blown downby Japanese bombs on September 18, 1931.Like the two reliefs, these two steles (bei)convey the intertwined narratives ofvictimization and victory.

The major tropes of the external design of themuseum and its outdoor memorials andsculptures are presented in more narrativeform in the museum exhibitions. First, thePrefatory Hall (Xu Ting) echoes the two modesof representing the war and sets the context forappreciating the chronological exhibits thatfollow.

Prefatory Hall of the September 18 HistoryMuseum

The not-quite-rectangular hall is subtly lit withceiling floodlights; it has a polished blackmarble floor and white plaster reliefs cover thefour walls. There is a strong contrast betweenthe dark floor and lighted white reliefs. Thereliefs, we are told in a museum catalogue,represent the mountains of China, while theblack marble floor represents its rivers, visuallyreferring to the phrase baishan heishui (whitemountains, black rivers), a surrogate term forDongbei (i.e., the Changbai Mountains andHeilong River). Although the room thus has alocal flavor, mountains and rivers arecommonly used to stand for China as awhole.[57] On the floor near the middle of thehall is a four-foot-high black marble pyramid

capped by a red “eternal flame” (not real fire,but some sort of electric light), representingthe martyrs of the Northeast, “with their spiritof unyielding resistance and their eternalnational heroic spirit.” On the four sides of thepyramid is text in Chinese, Japanese, English,and Russian. We are told in the text thatSeptember 18 is “etched” in the hearts of theChinese people and that it marks the beginningof fourteen years of Japanese occupation duringwhich many people sacrificed their lives. Abovethe pyramid are fourteen blue lights (one foreach year of occupation), which cast a blue pallon the red “flame” below. The visual contrastbetween the somber blue of occupation and theheroic red of resistance embodies the tensionbetween victimization and heroic resistancenarratives.

After the memorial hall, the spectator proceedsdown a long walkway to the beginning of theexhibition proper. The exhibition opens with anovertly internationalist perspective: Japaneseimperialism is portrayed as part of a largerglobal fascism and China’s resistance as part ofg l o b a l r e s i s t a n c e t o i t . [ 5 8 ] T h i sinternationalizing of the struggle can perhapsbe seen as part of China’s present efforts to“join with the world,” but it also serves to linkJapan’s evil with the globally recognized evil ofthe Nazis. However, it strikes me that this is arather token internationalism and that both thethrust and the details of the exhibition aresolidly within the nationalist paradigm.

The exhibition is structured in six display halls:(1) Historical Background; (2) Outbreak of theIncident and the Loss of the Northeast; (3)Japan’s Bloody Rule in the Northeast; (4) TheResistance Struggle of the Northeast Army andPeople; (5) The Whole Nation Resists, theNortheast is Restored, and the Final Chapter ofJapanese Imperialism; and (6) Let History Be aMirror, Hope for Peace, and Be on GuardAgainst the Return of Japanese Militarism. As isalmost universal in Chinese history museums,the material is presented chronologically. The

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exhibits make conventional use of photographs,texts, and maps; but more than the othermuseums discussed in this chapter, theyemploy innovative exhibitionary techniquesthat reveal the influences of popular and visualculture. What stand out in the museum are itsnumerous models, dioramas, and multimediadisplays. History and atrocity are offered asvisual and dramatic spectacles for the visitor.For example, through cracks in a wall, thespectator can peer, rather voyeuristically, intoa life-size scene recreating a gruesome, thoughsomewhat campy, Unit 731 operating room. Byhiding the display behind a partial wall, thecurators may be shielding it from youngervisitors, but it also draws attention to the verynotion of spectatorship. A “demonstrationscene” (yanshi changing), a framed scene withlights and recorded narration that consists ofthe bones of corpses murdered by the Japanesein the infamous Pingdingshan Massacre of1932, is also typical of the specular and visualquality of exhibits in this museum.

Music often combines with three-dimensionalvisuality to give many displays a highlytheatrical quality. For instance, in the secondexhibit hall there is a display of bronze statuesof refugees titled “Sorrow of Exile” (Liuwanghen), which shows an array of citizens fleeingthe Japanese occupation of the Northeast. The“citizens” include peasants, but also students,who appear to be doing anti-Japanesepropaganda work.

“Sorrow of Exile” sculpture depictingrefugees

The sculpture i s c lear ly drawing onconventional historical memories of theJapanese occupation in which the image ofrefugees from the Northeast f iguredprominently. On the wall behind the bronzesculptures are the music and lyrics to “On theSonghua River” (Songhua jiang shang), amorose song about September 18 and the lossof homeland. References to songs—generallystandard revolutionary songs—appearthroughout the museum’s exhibits.

In the section on national resistance toJapanese occupation, there is an impressivelarge-scale diorama called “Camp Song”(Luying ge).

“Camp Song,” a large-scale diorama at theSeptember 18 History Museum

The song referred to in the title of the dioramawas written by Li Zhaolin, a general who wroteit during a particularly difficult period in histroop’s struggle against the enemy. The songplayed an important role in Maoist narrativesand earlier museum representations of the war(e.g., Northeast Martyrs Memorial Hall). Thediorama, designed by Wang Jihou of theShenyang HuaXia Exhibition Arts EngineeringCompany, recreates the scene described in the

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lyrics of the song.[59] The three-dimensionalscene brings a highly theatrical element intothe exhibitionary space. Musical and theatricalspectacle combine to form an impressivedisplay, one that serves little to propel thechronological narrative of the exhibition butthat seeks to evoke emotional resonances of thelost homeland and the heroic struggle torecover it. As a museum brochure puts it: “Withthe ‘Camp Song’ . . . as its theme and the vastexpanse of white snow and dense white birchforest as its background, the scene describesthe unyielding struggling spirit and highrevolutionary optimism of soldiers of the UnitedArmy.”

Among the more powerful dioramas in themuseum is one of life-size wax figures ofJapanese war criminals being tried in aShenyang court in 1956. The twenty-eight waxfigures are dressed in black, and their headsare bowed in recognition of their guilt; behindthem is a collage of photographic images ofChinese victims of the war with soaring planes,exploding bombs, and huge plumes of smoke inthe background. The diorama captures guiltand contrition in a highly emotional visuallanguage. Coming near the end of theexhibition, it offers powerful testimony to theChinese nationalist take on the fair judgment ofhistory. The exhibition ends with the bronzesculpture “The Monument to the ChineseFoster Parents,” a memorial donated byJapanese to the Chinese parents who raisedJapanese children orphaned by the war.

“The Monument to the Chinese FosterParents,” a sculpture near the end of thebasic exhibition in the September 18History Museum

It shows a Chinese peasant couple with aJapanese child standing between them andlooking up lovingly at his “mother.” Obviously,the sculpture echoes the many images ofChinese mothers torn from their own childrenthat are to be found in the museums discussedabove. The sculpture portrays the Chinese in anunmistakably positive moral light; even afterbeing horribly victimized by brutal occupiers,the sculpture suggests, the Chinese still hadcompassion for the children of their oppressorsand raised them, with presumably superiorChinese moral standards.

The Concluding Remarks to the exhibition arerather revealing. The text reads:

As we are about to leave theexhibition room, everyone’s heartis dripping blood, and every dropof blood seems to congeal into a

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quest ion mark : How cou ldJapanese imperialism dare to lift abutcher’s knife against our greatand vast China? Every photo hereforms a chain of ironclad facts, buthow can there be people who stillrefuse to confront them, or whoeven distort those facts, or rewritethem? [It is said that] “if you’rebackward, you will be beaten,” butwhy are we backward? The facesof the deceased presented here areall crying out [nahan]. What dotheir cries tell us? Do they tell us:“A people/nation that forgets itsheroes is a degenerate one”? Dothey also tell us: “If you forgetsuffering, suffering may once againknock on the nation’s doors”? Dothey tell us: “It begins with me,with the present”? Or do they tellus: “To revive China, everyonebears responsibility”?

The interrogative mode here seems a ratherempty nod to a more postmodern sensibility,and the museum concludes with a baldassertion of the facts of Japanese aggression inChina. Of all the museums discussed here, theSeptember 18 History Museum bends the mostto the demands of popular nationalism, popularculture, and the spectacle.

Conclusion

Threatened as they are by popular culture andcaught between official rhetoric and thedemands of the cultural marketplace, museumstry desperately to be relevant in contemporaryChinese society. One way they can do this isthrough the nationalist representation of horrorand atrocity. In their attention to victimization,atrocity, and suffering, these museums areprimarily motivated by a desire to evokenationalist sentiments; they both appeal to alatent nationalism and help to shape it. In thischapter, I have looked at four museums

devoted to Japanese imperialism and atrocitiescommitted during Japan’s fourteen-yearoccupation of China. They differ in their modesof representation: the conventionality of theWar of Resistance Memorial Hall , theminimalist humanism of the Nanjing MassacreMemorial, the “authenticity” of the Unit 731Museum, and the spectacle of the September18 History Museum. Despite their differences,they share a tension between emphasis onsuffering and victimization, on the one hand,and heroic resistance and victory, on the other.

Together, these two principal modes ofrepresenting the War of Resistance AgainstJapan are at odds, but they also work hand inhand and need each other. Although there isplenty of attention in these museums to the roleof the CCP in leading resistance to Japan, thisis not their primary message. Rather, they seekto involve the visitor in a shared history ofnational suffering and, perhaps most important,of overcoming that suffering. It goes withoutsaying that museums are not the only forms ofremembering this national suffering (thepopular histories discussed by Gries andhistorical Web sites are two other importantmodes), but they are, with their imposingarchitecture, “authentic” physical artifacts, andclose association with the state, a particularlyimportant and powerful one.

Kirk A. Denton is associate professor ofChinese literature and culture at The OhioState University. He is author of TheProblematic of Self in Modern ChineseL i t e r a t u r e : H u F e n g a n d L u L i n g(http://www.amazon.com/Problematic-Self-Mode r n - C h i n e s e -Literature/dp/0804731284/ref=sr_1_1/103-2596424-4990219?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192633709&sr=8-1) (Stanford, 1998) and editor ofModern Chinese Literature Thought: Writingson Literature, 1893-1945 (Stanford, 1996) andof the journal Modern Chinese Literature andCulture (http://mclc.osu.edu/jou/mclc.htm). He

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is working on a book on the politics andideology of museums’ representation of modernhistory in Greater China.

Posted at Japan Focus on October 17, 2007.

This essay was first published, in a slightlydifferent form, as “Horror and Atrocity:Memory of Japanese Imperialism in ChineseMuseums,” in Ching Kwan Lee and GuobinYang, eds., Re-envisioning the ChineseRevolution: The Politics and Poetics ofCollective Memories in Reform China(Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson CenterPress, 2007), 245–86.

[1] See Ken Sekine, “Verbose Silence in 1939Chongqing: Why Ah Long's Nanjing Could NotB e P u b l i s h e d . ”(http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/sekine.htm) MCLCResource Center, 2004. The novel was firstpublished as Nanjing xueji (The bloody sacrificeof Nanjing) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1987).

[2] The online China News Digest NanjingMassacre Memorial Hall has published anEnglish translation of a 1962 work calledJapanese Imperialism and the Massacre inN a n j i n g(http://museums.cnd.org/njmassacre/njm-tran/index.html). The translator, Robert Gray, writesin the introduction that “In 1962, scholars atNanjing University’s Department of History(Japanese history section) wrote the bookJapanese Imperialism and the Massacre inNanjing (Riben diguozhuyi zai Nanjing dedatusha) based on extensive materials theyuncovered during a two-year investigation intothe Nanjing Massacre. After it was written, thebook was labeled a classified document (neibuziliao) and could not be published openly.”

[3] Mark Eykholt, “Aggression, Victimization,and Chinese Historiography of the NanjingMassacre,” in The Nanjing Massacre in Historyand Historiography , ed. Joshua Fogel

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000),11–69.

[4] Ian Buruma, “The Joys and Perils ofVictimhood,” New York Review of Books (April8, 1999), 4–9.

[5] The fact that the hibakusha, the victims ofthe atomic bombing, are at the forefront ofremembering the war and of the peacemovement in Japan, would suggest thatBuruma’s remarks are not universally true.

[6] E.g., see Sheldon H. Harris, Factories ofDeath: Japanese Biological Warfare,1932–1945, and the American Cover-Up (NewYork: Routledge, 2002).

[7] Mitter suggests that as the Maoist ideologyand its pivotal historical moments lostresonance for the Chinese people in the post-Mao era: “In looking for a theme to inspireunity, the leadership was forced to turn to thecataclysmic event of the century, War ofResistance to Japan.” See Mitter, “Behind theScenes at the Museum,” 280. To highlight thepoint, Mitter compares the War of Resistancemuseum representation with that of the olderChinese Military Museum (Zhongguo JunshiBowuguan), which stresses in its treatment ofthe war the struggle between “Communistvirtue and Nationalist evil” (p. 282). Mitterimplies that prior to the Deng era, the War ofResistance did not play an important role inmyth making and political legitimization, whichis not the case. However, there certainly was arenewed attention to the war and new forms ofremembering it in the post-Mao era, which Itake to be Mitter’s principal point.

[8] I have in mind Dai Qing’s work on the WangShiwei and Chu Anping incidents in Yan’an. SeeDai Qing, Wang Shiwei and “Wild Lilies”:Rectification and Purges in the ChineseCommunist Party, 1942–1944 (Armonk, N.Y.:M. E. Sharpe, 1994).

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[9] For a discussion of the culture of “bobos”(bourgeois bohemians) and “neo-tribes” inChina, see Jing Wang, “Bourgeois Bohemians inChina? Neo-Tribes and the Urban Imaginary,”China Quarterly 183 (September 2005):532–48.

[10] Arif Dirlik, “‘Trapped in History’ on theWay to Utopia: East Asia’s Great War FiftyYears Later,” in Perilous Memories, in PerilousMemories: 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, EconomicRivalries Blamed: History Not Key Issue,” JapanTimes, April 19, 2005.

[13] There are other museums in China thatdeal with Japanese atrocities, e.g., thePingdingshan Massacre Museum (in Fushun,Liaoning), the Northeast Occupation Hall at theManchukuo Palace (Changchun, Jilin), and theNortheast Martyrs Memorial Hall (Harbin). Theformer, established in 1972, promotes itself asthe museum that represents the history ofJapan’s “first” massacre on Chinese soil. InSeptember 1932, Japanese soldiers slaughtered3,000 villagers at the foot of PingdingMountain. More recently, a private War ofResistance Museum opened outside Chengdu.Initiated and financed by a local entrepreneur,Fan Jianchuan, the museum, which is part of acomplex of museums that includes exhibitionhalls devote to the Cultural Revolution, is billedas the largest private museum in China.Interestingly, this private museum does notconstruct clear historical narratives in thesame explicit way that most state museums do.

[14] A slew of scholarly books published inrecent years focuses on the topic of

neonationalism in the PRC. In addition to Gries,China’s New Nationalism, see Lowell Dittmerand Samuel S. Kim, eds., China’s Quest forNational Identity (Ithaca, N.Y.: CornellUniversity, 1993); Yingjie Guo, CulturalNationalism in Contemporary China: TheSearch for National Identity under Reform(London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); andJonathan Unger, ed., Chinese Nationalism(Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996).

[15] From “ZhongRi liangguo renmin yinggaishishi daidai youhao xiaqu” (The people ofChina and Japan should be friends generationafter generation), a speech given on September15, 1972, during the visit of the Japanese primeminister to China. The phrase originates fromthe Zhanguo ce (Chronicle of the WarringStates).

[16] See Paul A. Cohen, “Remembering andForgetting: National Humiliation in Twentieth-Century China,” Twentieth-Century China 27,no. 2 (April 2002): 1–39. Karl Gerth’s study ofthe relative failure of the “national products”movement in Republican China would suggestthat average urban Chinese were indeedforgetting about national humiliation and weremore concerned with daily survival or withenjoying foreign consumer products. See KarlGerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and theCreation of the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Asia Center, 2003).

[17] Citing a 1990s survey of a group of fourthgraders, Waldron points out that only 30percent could identify Mao Zedong and onlyone could sing the entire national anthem, butall knew the Hong Kong pop singer Liu Dehua(Andy Lau). See Waldron, “China’s NewRemembering,” 976. I should add that the statein the PRC has aggressively developed Websites promoting patriotic education, many witha recurring theme of not forgetting. One suchs i t e i s c a l l e d W u w a n g g u o c h i(http://www.wwgc.cc).

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[18] Cohen, “Remembering and Forgetting,” 2.

[19] Haiyan Lee has suggested that“sentiment” is a key element in forging a senseof shared history and national community. SeeHaiyan Lee, “Sympathy, Hypocrisy, and theTrauma of Chineseness,” Modern ChineseLiterature and Culture 16, no. 2 (Fall 2004):76–122.

[20] James Edward Young, The Texture ofMemory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,1993), 6. For a discussion of memory sites, seealso 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 ofclass in Chinese museums, see Kirk A. Denton,“Museums, Memorial Sites and ExhibitionaryCulture in the People’s Republic of China,”China Quarterly 183 (2005): 565–86.

[22] Susan Sontag makes this argument in OnPhotography (New York: Farrar, Straus &Giroux. 1977). In her more recent Regardingthe Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus &Giroux, 2003), she questions her originalargument and asks skeptically: “What is theevidence that photographs have a diminishingimpact, that our culture of spectatorshipneutralizes the moral force of photographs ofatrocities?” p. 105).

[23] In the United States alone, there are atleast four major Holocaust museums (in NewYork City, Washington, Los Angeles, andHouston). For a general discussion ofmemorialization with regard to Holocaustmuseums, see Young, Texture of Memory, theopening sentence of which reads: “The furtherevents of World War II recede in time, the moreprominent its memorials become” (p. 1).

[24] For discussions of the new remembering ofthe World War II in Asia, see Arthur Waldron,

“China’s New Remembering of World War II:The Case of Zhang Zizhong,” Modern AsianStudies 30, no. 4 (1996): 869–99; Sheila M.Jager, Narratives of Nation-Building in Korea: AGenealogy of Patriotism (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E.Sharpe, 2003); the special “Asia-Pacific War:History and Memory” issue of the IIASNewsletter (September 2005); and Jui-teChang, 2001. “The Politics of Commemoration:A Comparative Analysis of the Fiftieth-Anniversary Commemoration in MainlandChina and Taiwan of the Victory in the Anti-Japanese War,” in The Scars of War: TheImpact of Warfare on Modern China, ed., DianaLary 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 theU n i t e d S t a t e s , ”(http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2477)inJapan Focus.

[25] For a discussion of globalization and itseffects on Chinese museums, see Li Wenru, ed.,Quanqiuhua xia de Zhongguo bowuguan(Chinese museums under the condition ofglobalization) (Beijing: Wenbo, 2002).

[26] Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking: TheForgotten Holocaust of World War II (NewYork: Basic Books, 1997), translated intoChinese in 1998, is but one example. The realimpetus for remembering the NanjingMassacre occurred in 1982, with the Chineseresponse to the textbook controversy in Japan.See Daqing Yang, “The Malleable and theContested: The Nanjing Massacre in PostwarChina and Japan,” in Perilous Memories: TheAsia-Pacific War(s), ed. T. Fujitana, GeoffreyWhite, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham, N.C.:Duke University Press, 2001), 50–86. For anoverview of new research on the NanjingMassacre, see David Askew, “New Research ont h e N a n j i n g I n c i d e n t , ”(http://www.japanfocus.org/109.html)JapanFocus (2004). General studies of the Nanjing

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Massacre include: Joshua Fogel, ed, TheN a n j i n g M a s s a c r e i n H i s t o r y a n dHistoriography (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2000); and Feifei Li, RobertSabella, and David Liu, eds., Nanjing 1937:Memory and Healing (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe,2002).

[27] Qi Kang, Qin Hua Ri jun Nanjing datushayunan tongbao jinianguan (Memorial to thevictims of the massacre by Japanese invaders ofChina) (Shenyang: Liaoning Kexue Jishu, 1999).

[28] Wang Yiting, Baiyi e’mo (Evil in whitecoats) (Pingfang: Hua Ri Jun Di Qisanyi BuduiZuizheng Chenlieguan, n.d.), 2.

[29] Iris Chang famously made this link in thesubtitle to her book (The Rape of Nanking: TheForgotten Holocaust of World War II) on theNanjing Massacre, but Buruma suggests thatthis linking goes all the way back to the 1946Tokyo Trials. See Ian Buruma, “The NanjingMassacre as a Historical Symbol,” in Nanking1937: Memory and Healing, ed. Feifei Li,Robert Sabella, and David Liu (Armonk, N.Y.:M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 1–9; the citation here is on7. In the United States, a group of ChineseAmericans has formed a museum devoted toJapanese imperialism in China and is calling itthe Chinese Holocaust Museum. See Buruma,“Joys and Perils of Victimhood” .

[31] Lin Biao’s 1965 tract on the War ofResistance is typical of Maoist representationsof the war period. Lin tells the story of theheroic victory of a weaker nation against amuch more powerful foe. Lin explains this“miraculous” victory with three main points: (1)The war was a “genuinely people’s war” andhad the support of the people, (2) Mao’smilitary strategy of “guerrilla warfare” waseffective, and (3) the war effort was guided byMao Zedong Thought. See Lin Biao, Long Livethe Victory of the People’s War (Beijing:Foreign Languages Press, 1965).

[32] War films were numerous in the Maoistera. 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 OuyangHongying, 1963), the latter of which iscurrently being remade.

[33] “The March of the Volunteers” (Yiyongjunjinxingqu), with lyrics by the playwright TianHan and music by Nie Er, became the “official”national anthem only in 1982, before which itwas used unofficially in that capacity. Duringthe Cultural Revolution, of course, becauseTian Han was denounced, “The March of theVolunteers” was replaced by “The East Is Red”(Dong fang hong). For a discussion of “TheMarch” 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: ThePolitics and Poetics of Collective Memories inReform China (Washington, DC: WoodrowWilson Press, 2007), 217-44; and Chang-TaiHung, “The Politics of Songs: Myths andSymbols 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 discursiveuse of the war in postrevolutionary politicalrhetoric, I should point out that some Westernscholars also see the war period as critical. AsDavid Apter and Tony Saich argue, the warperiod made possible Mao’s “Republic” and the“revolutionary discourse” upon which it wasfounded. 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 achapter in the larger narrative of liberation.However, I take issue with Rana Mitter andArthur Waldron, who argue that the war wasnot an important part of Maoist constructionsof the past. Waldron cites as evidence theabsence of a central war memorial in the

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Beijing cityscape, and Mitter suggests thatbefore the 1980s the war occupied only a minorplace in historical narratives, such as thatfound in the Military Museum. Although theirintent ion is to shed l ight on the newsignificance of memory of the war in the post-Mao era, Mitter and Waldron give the falseimpression that memory of the war was a blankin the Maoist era. See Rana Mitter, “Behind theScenes at the Museum: Nationalism, Historyand Memory in the Beijing War of ResistanceMuseum, 1987–1997,” China Quarterly 161(2000): 278–93; and Andrew Waldron, “China’sNew Remembering.”

[35] Museums officials told me that fundingwas scarce, and they did not know when therenovation would begin, let alone becompleted.

[36] More recently, in the summer of 2005, themuseum put on an exhibit in commemoration ofthe sixtieth anniversary of the victory of theAnti-Japanese War called “The Ruins andCrimes of the Harbin Police Headquarters ofthe Manchukuo Puppet Regime.”

[37] For a discussion of this museum, seeMitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum.”For an excellent discussion of the historicalresonances of the site of the Lugou Bridge, seeJames A. Flath, “Setting Moon and RisingNationalism: Lugou Bridge as Monument andMemory,” International Journal of HeritageStudies 10, no. 2 (2004): 175–92. I also usedthe following museum publication: Zhongguorenmin kangri zhanzheng jinianguan (Memorialof the Chinese People’s War of ResistanceAgainst the Japanese) (Beijing: ZhongguoHeping, 1998).

[38] The 2005 renovation substantiallytransformed the museum’s exhibitions. Threespecial exhibits—the Japanese Army Atrocitiesexhibit, People’s War exhibit, and MartyrsHall—have been eliminated, though elements ofeach have been integrated into a single

comprehensive exhibit, now titled Great Victory(Weida shengli). Great Victory is characterizedby a new emphasis on the war as a key part ofthe larger global anti-fascist struggle. The waris still represented as a critical period inChinese history, but rather than a chapter inthe larger narrative of revolution andliberation, it is now a pivotal period in China’semergence as a global power. As exhibitionplacards put it, the war marks “the greatrenaissance of the Chinese people,” in itstransition from “weakness” (shuaibai) to“flourishing” (zhenxing). Clearly, theideological impetus behind the exhibition’srepresentation of the war is connected toChina’s new status in the global economy andits pretensions to global greatness. That theemotionality of the second stage exhibition hasbeen muted marks perhaps a more rationalapproach to the war that is consistent withChina’s maturation as a member of thecommunity of nations.

[39] See Mitter, “Behind the Scenes in theMuseum.” In a September 2005 speechcommemorating the sixteith anniversary of thevictory of the war, Hu Jintao made thisrecognition of Nationalist war efforts part ofofficial party rhetoric. Moreover, the war isnow commonly framed as a dimension of thelarger antifascist struggle in World War II,which I believe is connected to the largerdiscursive project in the contemporary PRC ofconnecting China with the world (zou xiangshijie or yu shijie tong gui).

[40] Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at theMuseum,” 286.

[41] Mitter, ibid., also notes the innovate use,perhaps influenced by Western memorials, ofan “unknown” soldier for the central statue inthe hall . Although it may be true that“unknown” soldiers are not generally used inChinese war memorials, they do appearfrequently in revolutionary oil painting. For adiscussion of images of martyrs in Chinese

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revolutionary mythology, see Kirk A. Denton,“Visual Memory and the Construction of aRevolutionary Past: Paintings from the Museumof the Chinese Revolution,” Modern ChineseLiterature and Culture 12, no. 2 (Fall):203–235.

[42] Buruma suggests that the idea for thememorial was Deng Xiaoping’s. See Buruma,“Nanjing Massacre as Historical Symbol,” 8.Daqing Yang asserts that the memorial was adirect response to the textbook debates of 1982in Japan. See his “Mirror for the Future or theHistory Card? Understanding the ‘HistoryProblem.’” In Chinese-Japanese Relations in theTwentieth-First Century: Complementarity andConflict, 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 LiangSicheng prize for design in 2000. This was thefirst year of the prize, and it was presented toseveral architects for work done as far back as1960.

[46] Qi Kang shows awareness of the differenceof doing a memorial for Yuhuatai and theNanjing Massacre memorial. See ibid.

[47] The sculpture is apparently based on ashot in the American missionary John Magee’sdocumentary film footage of the atrocities.

[48] Buruma, “Nanjing Massacre as HistoricalSymbol,” 9.

[49] Ido not mean to suggest here that this andother memorial sites are not sometimes used bypeople for the expression of local and personalconcerns that are sometimes at odds withofficial state policy, only that these uses areultimately circumscribed by the state.

[50] Although not exclusively responsible byany means, Ishii Shiro is considered the fatherof Japanese medical and germ warfareexperiments in Manchuria. In 1932, shortlyafter arriving in Manchuria, Major Ishiiestablished a factory for immune experimentsin the warehouse district of Harbin, but forhuman experimentation he needed a moreremote spot that could not be seen by theforeign community. He soon came upon thetown of Beiyinhe, about 100 kilometers south ofHarbin, where he established the Zhong MaCamp (Zhongma cheng). This was used as abase for experimentation until 1937, when thecamp was disbanded and destroyed after aprisoner insurrection. In 1936, Ishii wasappointed head of the Water PurificationBureau, in reality a front for his experiments.In 1936, Pingfang was selected as the newlocation for Unit 731. It was completed in 1939,having some seventy-two structures. Until theend of the war, experiments in germ warfarewere conducted on thousands of Chinese. Forgeneral 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 amemorial site as well. See Walter Benjamin,Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (NewYork: Schocken Books, 1968), 222–23. Holdingan exhibition about horror at the site where thehorror took place gives it an “authenticity” itwould lose in a different setting. And althoughmuseums would generally be considered a formthrough which aura is lost, the “site museum”is an exception. “Site museums” are oneclassification of museums in China, and thereare even volumes devoted to their study. See,e.g., Yizhi bowuguan xue gailun (Generaldiscussions of the study of site museums) (Xian:Shanxi Renmin, 1999).

[52] Young, Texture of Memory, 119.

[53] The term “mood of memory” comes from

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Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: TheStruggle to Create America's HolocaustMuseum (New York: Penguin Books, 1995),168.

[54] Upon entering the museum, the spectatoris given an identification card upon which is thename and life story of a real Holocaust victim.The exhibits, especially those on the secondlevel of the building, give a sensation of theHolocaust. Philip Gourevitch has written that“violence and the grotesque are central to theAmerican aesthetic, and the Holocaust Museumprovides both amply. It is impossible to take inthe exhibition without becoming somewhatinured to the sheer graphic horror on display;indeed, i t would be unbearable to bedefenseless in such a place. A flat response,however, is less unsettling than is the potentialfor excitement, for titillation, and evenseduction by the overwhelmingly powerfulimagery. The museum courts the viewer’sfascination, encouraging familiarity with theincomprehensible and the unacceptable; one isrepeatedly forced into the role of a voyeur ofthe prurient.” See Philip Gourevitch, “BeholdNow Behemoth: The Holocaust MemorialMuseum—One More American Theme Park,"

Harper’s Magazine (July 1993).

[ 5 5 ] S e e t h e(http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1:13979094/Behold+now+behemoth~C~+the+Holocaust+Memorial+Museum~C~+one+more+American+ t h e m e + p a r k . h t m l ) w e b s i t e(http://www.918museum.org.cn/news/ReadNews.asp?NewsID=793).

[56] Bells in Chinese culture representatonement of sins and enlightenment. Bothsignificances are at play here.

[57] E.g., two large photographs, one ofmountains , one of a r iver , begin theComprehensive Exhibit of the War ofResistance Museum discussed above.[58] This position on the international nature ofthe War of Resistance was made “official” inSeptember 2005 in statements by Hu Jintaocommemorating the sixtieth anniversary of thevictory of the war.

[59] Wang’s work has been primarily in stagedesign, but his company has also been involvedin wax displays for Beijing’s China Wax FiguresMuseum and Dalian’s Gold Wax FiguresMuseum. The former is a temporary exhibit inthe National Museum of China.