Remembrance of the Nanjing Massacre in the

Globalised Era: The Memory of Victimisation,

Emotions and the Rise of China

Fengqi Qian
School of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Faculty of Arts, Deakin University
fengqi.qian@deakin.edu.au

Guo-Qiang Liu
School of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Faculty of Arts, Deakin University
guo-qiang.liu@deakin.edu.au

Victimisation is a pivotal theme in China’s new remembering of its War of Resistance against Japanese
Aggression. While much of the world is talking about the rise of China, why are the Chinese still looking
back to the nation’s sufferings in the past? This article investigates the development and dissemination
of China’s collective memory of wartime victimisation, through a case study of the Nanjing Massacre
Memorial. The article examines the ‘presentist’ use of the collective memory of victimisation in China’s
era of opening up. It argues that the collective memory of victimisation is an emotional memory, evoked
by new nationalism thinking, and is therefore a contextual dimension of China’s self-presentation today.
The development as well as the dissemination of this memory parallels the path of China’s rise to become
a world power. The Nanjing Massacre Memorial showcases the way in which the collective memory
of victimisation is shaped and disseminated under the Communist Party to promote China’s national
aspirations and legitimise China’s claims in the contemporary world.

Keywords: Collective memory, World War II, Nanjing massacre, victimisation, rise
of China

CHINA REPORT 55 : 2 (2019): 81–101

Sage Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC/
Melbourne
DOI: 10.1177/0009445519834365
82 Fengqi Qian and Guo-Qiang Liu

INTRODUCTION

On 13 December 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping attended the state memorial cer-
emony for the 80th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre (1937) and delivered a speech
to the whole nation. It was Xi’s second appearance at the ceremony since 2014, the year
when the National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre victims was established by
the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislature. In China today, four memorial
dates are designated to commemorate the main events of the Chinese People’s War of
Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1931–45) (hereafter referred to as the War of
Resistance or the War): the Japanese occupation of Shenyang in northeast China on
18 September 1931; the Japanese troops’ bombardment of Luqouqiao (Marco Polo
Bridge) near Beijing on 7 July 1937; the fall of the then Chinese capital Nanjing to
Japanese troops on 13 December 1937; and Victory Day on 2 September 1945. Except
for Victory Day, the commemorations of these dates are associated with China’s losses
and sufferings during the War. Since the 1980s, a large number of memorial museums
have been built across the country, seemingly joining in what Paul Williams refers to
as a ‘global rush to commemorate atrocities’ (Williams 2007). Of these museums, the
Memorial Hall for Compatriots Killed in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese forces
(hereafter the Nanjing Massacre Memorial) is best known in China and to the world.
The Nanjing Massacre (once known as the Nanking Massacre) refers to mass kill-
ings of Chinese civilians and disarmed Chinese soldiers by Japanese troops in Nanjing
(then China’s capital), which occurred between December 1937 and January 1938,
immediately after the city fell to Japanese occupation and the defending Chinese army
ceased its resistance. The catastrophic episode is briefly described in China’s submis-
sion to UNESCO in 2014 for the inclusion of the Nanjing Massacre in the Memory
of the World Register:

The Japanese soldiers swarmed over the city and committed various atrocities. . .
Organised and wholesale murder of male civilians was conducted with the apparent
sanction of the commanders with the pretention that Chinese soldiers had removed
their uniforms and were mingling with the population. . . . Estimates made at a
later date indicated that the total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered
in Nanking and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation
was over 200,000. . . These figures do not take into account those persons whose
bodies were destroyed by burning, or by throwing them into the Yangtze River, or
otherwise disposed by Japanese. (UNESCO 2015)

China now places the Nanjing Massacre alongside Nazi Germany’s death camp at
Auschwitz-Birkenau and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, all with the same level
of significance. In mainstream media, discussions began at the turn of the century on
the possibility for the massacre sites to be listed as World Heritage Sites, since both
the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Hiroshima sites are already on the list (People.com.cn.

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2004). Recent years have seen China stepping up its efforts to transmit globally the
memory of the Nanjing Massacre and other atrocities by the Japanese invaders dur-
ing the War. In 2014, the Central Archives of China and a number of other archival
institutions across the country, in collaboration with the Nanjing Massacre Memorial,
submitted to UNESCO the ‘Documents of Nanjing Massacre’ for its inclusion in the
Memory of the World Register. The bidding was successful, and the ‘Documents of
Nanjing Massacre’ was listed in the abovementioned Register in 2015. The UNESCO
submission and inscription led to some finger pointing between China and Japan. In
response to China’s submission of the ‘Documents of Nanjing Massacre’ for UNESCO
listing, the Japanese Government repeatedly asked China to retract the nomination,
complaining that the nomination ‘unnecessarily emphasises a negative legacy from
a certain period of the past’ between the two countries (McCurry 2015), and then
threatened to block the application (Xinhuanet.com 2015a). Fighting back, China’s
Xinhua News posted a commentary rebuking Japan and said that its protest ‘exposes
its guilty conscience over the hideous barbarities committed by the Japanese Imperial
Army against its Asian neighbours and the country’s cowardice to face up to its wartime
history even after seven decades’ (Xinhuanet.com 2015b).
International academia has long noticed what is referred to as China’s ‘new
remembering’ of the War (Coble 2007; Mitter 2003) in the post-Mao era, with
research findings pointing to two main aspects: the Chinese nation represented by
the Communist/nationalist-led united front against Japanese Aggression and the narra-
tive shift ‘from victor to victim’ (Gries 2004) in the historiography about the War.
Examinations of the driving factors of the ‘new remembering’ so far have focused on,
first, the emergence of new nationalism in China’s ideological landscape after Mao. It
is widely accepted that new nationalism in contemporary China meets the needs of
the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) to deal with challenges and risks brought about
by the country’s opening up (Coble 2007; Cohen 2002; Gries 2004; He 2007, 2010,
2013; Mitter 2003, 2007). Second, given the divergent views of historical problems
between China and Japan (He 2007, 2010; Rose 2005; Wan 2006; Yang 2012), as He
points out, historical memory provides a strong explanation for the ups and downs in
Sino-Japanese relations (He 2010: 234). Commemorations of wartime atrocities also
have attracted scholarly attention in the new century, with research on China’s war
museums such as the Nanjing Massacre Memorial (Denton 2007, 2014; Violi 2012;
Yoshida 2014). Notably, research in this area integrates the above aspects into China’s
memorialisation of wartime sufferings. For example, Violi (2012) makes a striking
semiotic analysis of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, noting the expression of China’s
new national identity in the museum’s display. In his book Exhibiting the Past, Denton
argues that, under the label of patriotic education, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial
re-configures the historical narrative in order to legitimise CPC leadership as well as
China’s regional authority. Denton also remarks that the discourse of victimisation
suggests a view of the Chinese people as powerless, which does not sit well with present
Chinese pretension to national greatness (Denton 2014: 135–7).

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84 Fengqi Qian and Guo-Qiang Liu

Is victim narrative contradictory to China’s claim to be a ‘major country (daguo)’?

Now that the world is talking about China’s rise, and China has become the world’s
second-largest economy, why is China still looking back to its wartime victimisation?
How is the memory of victimisation shaped under the CPC? How does the victim
narrative serve China’s claims and interests, beyond Sino-Japanese relations, in the era
of global power shift? Undoubtedly, the memory of the Nanjing Massacre is highly
charged with pain and humiliation, so much so that it is an emotional memory. How
are emotions evoked and expressed in the memory of the nation’s victimisation?
This article explores these questions through the case study of the Nanjing Massacre
Memorial. Based mainly on existing studies, this article sits at the intersection among
development, interpretation as well as transmission of the collective memory of China’s
wartime victimisation and China’s self-presentation in the contemporary world. It seeks
more insights into the dynamics behind changes in the way in which wartime atrocities
are remembered and interpreted. The article adopts the notion of the collectiveness of
emotions and memory and seeks to understand its political implications. This is based
on the consideration that, since the CPC came into power, the remembrance of the
War in China has been a collective, national affair, rather than an interest of individu-
als alone. In other words, the remembrance of the War is directed and orchestrated
all the time by the CPC to suit its current agenda. The study covers a timespan from
the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the present day but
focuses mainly on the twenty-first century. The case study of the Nanjing Massacre
Memorial covers a period from the early 1980s to its most recent extension in 2015,
to allow for a comprehensive examination of the way in which the collective memory
of the War is presented.

The NANJING MASSACRE IN CHINA’S COLLECTIVE MEMORY

At the outset, it is necessary to look into some characteristics of collective memory.

First, collective memory is plural rather than individual—although individual experi-
ences are integrated into it. In other words, collective memory is a societal form of
memory involving individuals, but does not equal a collection of individual memories,
nor does it suggest a dichotomy between individual and society. It is a synthesised
memory that is derived from individual memories and has been shaped into a certain
pattern. This distinguishes collective memory from individual remembering in that
collective memory is capable of identity building, as it reflects the way in which a group
sees itself. To cite Halbwachs on this point, collective memory reflects how a group is
‘seen from within’, and it provides the group with a ‘self-portrait’ (Halbwachs 1980:
86). Second, collective memory has an enduring impact on current society as a shared
image that binds a society together (Shils 1981). For this reason, it is instrumental in
maintaining coalescence of the society and the nation. Third, according to Foucault,

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collective memory is a field of negotiation and contestation (Foucault 1977, cited in

Olick 2007a: 86). In this vein, collective memory is a particular type of knowledge
that allows a dominating group to assert its influence. Finally, collective memory is
regarded as the product of a subjective process that involves memory filtering and
meaning making—people holding this view regard the past as an entity constructed
by contemporaries for a variety of reasons (Lowenthal 1996: 59–74). In this view,
collective memory is fluid, selective and often subject to manipulation, a perception
that is referred to by some as constructivist (Wang 2012). The constructivist position
on collective memory reflects the Halbwachsian idea that remembrance is ‘a recon-
struction of the past using data taken from the present’ (Halbwachs 1980: 68). In this
sense, the significance of collective memory lies in its capability of using the past to suit
the needs of the present—an approach to the past that Jeffry Olick labels ‘presentist’
(Olick 2007b). The dominating group of the society, using its power and authority,
through selection and filtering and remembrance as well as deliberate forgetting, leads
the process where the past is reconstructed.
Victimhood is a special mnemonic terrain. The memory of victimhood, involv-
ing trauma and loss, is embedded in the ‘guilt and innocence binary’ (Lim 2010)
and highly charged with such emotions as pain and humiliation. In her study on the
cultural politics of emotions, Sara Ahmed regards emotions as a ‘political economy’
open for exploitation (Ahmed 2004: 45). The political application of emotions can be
articulated in two aspects. First, emotions shape social relationships. This has much to
do with the intrinsic nature, namely the ‘collectiveness’, of emotions, as noted by Sara
Ahmed and others. The sense and expressions of emotions cause empathy, creating
identification as a form of alignment, not only to bring one ‘into line with ourselves’ but
also to align oneself with some others and ‘against other others’ (Ahmed 2004: 52). In
other words, emotions modulate individuals’ identification with social groups (Mercer
1995; Sasley 2011, cited in Ross 2013). Furthermore, emotions ‘tend to modify the
terrain of allegiance in which individuals participate in from one historical moment
to the next’ (Ross 2013). Emotions also work performatively and have affective power.
Emotions, bearing the impact of histories that stay open (Ahmed 2004: 59), have the
power to produce a ‘signing’ effect, thus accumulating meaning and value (Ahmed
2004, 91–92). By recognising emotions as an ‘affective economy’ (Ahmed 2004: 55),
we treat emotions as an active means of making sense of the state and world politics.
Victimhood has become a focal point of the ongoing discussion on collective
memory (Olick 2007a). The collective memory of victimhood activates emotions
and contributes to building a strong tie among victims, and it therefore has a lasting
impact on communities. As David Lowenthal remarks, while martyrdom unifies a
nation, misery forges lasting bonds (Lowenthal 1996: 59–74). A vital part of the shared
identity of a nation, which is constituted in a relationship of otherness (Hodgkin and
Radstone 2003: 169), collective memory of victimhood arguably becomes a major
source of nationalism. As far as the memory of the Nanjing Massacre is concerned,
emotions constitute its core. Individual memories are synthesised to become a collective

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86 Fengqi Qian and Guo-Qiang Liu

memory of victimhood, while individual pain, humiliation, fear and hate are distilled
into a collective emotion, which is referred to as ‘national feeling’ and injected with
patriotism and nationalism. Needless to say, a collective emotion as such has profound
political implications.
As mentioned earlier, China’s collective memory of the War has featured a shift from
the ‘victor’ to ‘victim’ narrative. The public memorialisation of the Nanjing Massacre
parallels such a shift. During the post-war years, memories of the Nanjing Massacre
faded. For decades from the 1950s to the 1980s, little was done or said in this respect,
and public commemoration was generally absent. Joshua Fogel observed that, until
the turn of the twenty-first century, the atrocities during the Nanjing Massacre were
never given the importance or status they deserved in modern history (Fogel 2000:
1–9). Caroline Rose referred to the situation as ‘collective amnesia’ (Rose 2005: 36).
The lack of public remembrance of the Nanjing Massacre was in sharp contrast to
the way other major atrocities during World War II (e.g., Hitler’s death camp) were
memorialised. Scholarly research (Gries 2004; Sabella 2002; Wang 2012) has come
to some consensus: internally, the CPC claimed the whole credit for the victory of
the War, so a victor’s narrative dominated the war memory (Coble 2007; Gries 2004).
Such a tone was set by Mao. For example, in an essay written in 1938, Mao predicted
that Japanese invaders would be drowned in a ‘vast sea’ of Communist-led mass resist-
ance (Mao 1965: 160). Furthermore, CPC promoted heroism after the founding of
the PRC to promote national morale, which was necessary for strengthening the new
regime and dealing with crises such as the outbreak of the Korean War and the Sino-
Soviet split. Externally, China wanted to ‘detach Japan from the United States’ Cold
War embraces’ (Mitter 2003, 2007: 12) during the post-war decades. Meanwhile,
antagonism between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait was at its peak. In mainland
China, the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) was blamed by the CPC for
its alleged ‘non-resistance’ policy during the War, while its contributions and losses
were not acknowledged. Ian Buruma pointed out that ‘little was made in the People’s
Republic of the Nanjing Massacre because there were no Communist heroes in the
Nationalist capital in 1937’ (Buruma 1999: 4–7).
Apart from the abovementioned factors, the theory and the practice of class strug-
gle contributed to the way in which the War was remembered during the Mao era.
Essentially, the Maoist ideology was about class struggle, and this mind-set dominated
all walks of life in China throughout Mao’s rule. Public commemorations conducted
to promote loyalty to Mao and the CPC were dedicated to ‘people’s heroes’—par-
ticularly revolutionary martyrs who gave their lives for the cause of socialism and
communism, instead of victims of wartime atrocities. Arguably, Mao applied his
idea of class struggle to international politics as well in his final years, classifying
the world into three tiers, namely, the First World, the Second World and the Third
World. Mao’s idea was that China should unite with the Third World countries to
fight against the superpowers’ hegemony while trying to neutralise the Second World
countries, which included Japan.

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1972 saw the normalisation of diplomatic ties between Beijing and Tokyo. Not
surprisingly, the following decade was a honeymoon period in Sino-Japanese relations,
and so the ‘collective amnesia’ about the Nanjing Massacre continued into this period.
Friendship was the keynote, and public discussions of historical problems between
the two countries were scarcely heard. However, in the early 1980s, the silence was
broken. In China, the retrieval of memories of the Nanjing Massacre was triggered in
1982 by the Japanese textbook controversy, in which the Japanese Education Ministry
reportedly conducted a screening of school history textbooks to downplay Japanese
wartime atrocities, including the Nanjing Massacre. The textbook saga was in part
due to myth-making attempts with which elite conservatives in Japan sought to ‘shake
off the war stigma’ (He 2010: 206). The rise of historical revisionism on the Japanese
side evoked in China a fear of the revival of Japanese militarism, a concern clearly
expressed by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (Deng 1994: 228–9), who wanted Chinese
media and academia to take action (CPC News 1982). In August 1982, a seminar was
held in Nanjing to celebrate the 37th anniversary of Victory Day. The seminar was
organised by the Jiangsu Academy of History, and its attendees included historians,
community representatives and legal experts. The event was titled ‘Research Seminar
in Celebration of the Thirty-Seventh Anniversary of the Victory of Chinese People’s
Resistance War against the Japanese Aggression’, but the key topic was the Nanjing
Massacre. The seminar was held at the Nanjing Port Authority in Xiaguan District on
the south bank of the Yangtze River. The venue was chosen deliberately: during the
Nanjing Massacre this waterfront area was one of the key locations of mass slaughter.
The seminar could be seen as one of the initial efforts to retrieve public memories
about the Nanjing Massacre. In that year alone, 11 journal articles on the Nanjing
Massacre were published, with a torrent of publications that followed. Under the
change in the climate of Sino-Japanese relations, the mid-1980s saw the building of a
number of memorial museums devoted to Japanese wartime atrocities, a move made
under Deng’s direction. Most of these museums were built in situ, where atrocities
had taken place: for example, the biological warfare experiment base in Harbin and
the labour concentration camp in Fushun. The most prominent one was the Nanjing
Massacre Memorial. Public commemorations of wartime anniversaries were also
launched. However, it was only until 2014 that China’s National People’s Congress
passed a bill designating 13 December as the National Public Memorial Day for the
Nanjing Massacre.
Domestic imperatives constitute an important driver for developing the memory
of victimisation. As China opened its door to global markets, there emerged unprec-
edented challenges to the CPC’s authoritarian leadership. These included the emergence
of liberal, pro-democracy thinking, the disbanding of the former Soviet bloc and
student demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989, which was suppressed by the
government. It was urgent then that the CPC leadership find a rallying point to hold
together public opinion and convince the nation that ‘only the CPC can save China’
(a phrase repeatedly used by the CPC). The term ‘Century of National Humiliation’,

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88 Fengqi Qian and Guo-Qiang Liu

coined by nationalist elites in the early twentieth century and symbolic of nationalist
emotions, was retrieved and applied in patriotic education programmes. Deng Xiaoping
told the Party cadres that the nation should be reminded of its past victimhood at the
hands of imperialist powers:

After the Opium War of 1840, China was reduced to the status of a semi-colonial,
semi-feudal society . . . and when the Japanese invaded, a large part of its territory
was turned into a Japanese colony. Under the oppression of imperialism, feudalism
and bureaucratic capitalism that developed later, the country became poorer and
poorer. (Deng 1994: 206–6)

Shanghai-based historian Xiao Gongqin rightly points out that the narrative of China’s
‘Century of National Humiliation’ is deployed by the state to ‘jump start’ a sense of
belonging among the Chinese people (Xiao 1995). According to Xiao, contemporary
Chinese society is in need of a cohesive value system. This is because both traditional
and radical values were shattered over the past few decades: Confucianism was trashed
by Mao after the founding of the PRC, particularly during the Cultural Revolution
(1966–76), and the Maoist ideology of class struggle was then discarded by Deng
Xiaoping after Mao’s death. Xiao argues that two resources can be used to provide a
sense of cohesion: one is Confucianism, and the other is a ‘profound sense of national
humiliation’ (Xiao 1995). In other words, the ‘Century of National Humiliation’ nar-
rative not only strengthens Chinese people’s sense of belonging, but also alerts them
to any threat to national sovereignty, as the great dread of Chinese nationalists has
been a fear of ‘the death of the state’ (Fitzgerald 1996). More importantly, Xiao points
out, the ‘Century of National Humiliation’ narrative has nurtured a psychological
complex that has become deep rooted in Chinese mentality, and the sense of national
humiliation can be converted into national aspiration which is called ‘the dream of
becoming a strong nation’ (Xiao 1995). In this regard, the memory of victimhood,
together with the deep sense of pain and shame, is an integral part of the national
humiliation narrative and forms the foundation upon which the notion of ‘national
rejuvenation’ is based. In this vein, the dichotomy between victimhood and rejuvena-
tion coincides with a ‘fall and rise’ trajectory that William Callahan refers to as the
key to understanding Chinese neo-nationalism (Callahan 2004).
On the world stage, victimhood has been deployed to serve China’s global agendas
since it’s opening up, and the transmission of the memory of China’s victimhood is seen
as having two objectives—‘quantifying Chinese sufferings and presenting the Chinese
case to the world’ (Gries 2004: 79). As Mitter observes, the victim narrative plays an
important role in redefining Chineseness in the contemporary world, as the Cold War
definitions of Chinese identity no longer hold (Mitter 2007). Here the collectiveness
of emotion proves effective, with the Chinese in the PRC aligning themselves with
other Chinese to share the same sense of victimhood. During the first three decades
of opening up and reform (1980–2010), China’s external policies in general followed

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a principle set by Deng Xiaoping, that is, keeping a low profile and hiding one’s
brightness (tao guang yang hui), a pragmatic strategy to secure a peaceful international
environment for China’s economic development and convince the world of China’s
‘peaceful rise’ (although Chinese leaders preferred the term ‘peaceful development’).
As Ahmed has noted, ‘N(n)arratives of collective suffering increasingly have a global
dimension’, as they can be appropriated as ‘our loss’ (Ahmed 2004: 32). Dissemination
of China’s wartime suffering, apart from eliciting external sympathy, served China’s self-
presentation as a peace-loving country. In the present-day context in which China has
become more assertive in its claims in its neighbourhood, the victim narrative which
highlights China’s sufferings as well as sacrifices during the War helps legitimise these
claims. At a special interview for the 70th anniversary of Victory Day, Peng Guangqian,
Deputy Secretary-General of China’s National Security Forum, a consultative body
affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), asserted that a full acknowledge-
ment of China’s wartime contributions and losses by the international community was
overdue (Xinhuanet.com. 2015c). In August 2015, the state-owned newspaper China
Daily carried a special column dedicated to Victory Day celebrations under the head-
ing ‘China vital to triumph over fascism’. In his article for the column, Qu Qingshan,
Director of the CPC Central Committee’s Party History Research Centre, emphasised
the importance of the Far East theatre in World War II, in which China played the key
role, arguing that ‘the long war of attrition in China exhausted the strength of Japan,
leading to its surrender in World War II in 1945’ (chinadaily.com.cn. 2015a). In the
same year, addressing the grand mass assembly for the 70th anniversary celebration of
Victory Day, Chinese President Xi Jinping stated that the victory in War was a great
triumph that ‘re-established China as a major country in the world’. Looking back on
China’s wartime victimhood, Xi dismissed speculation that China would seek hegemony
and expansion in the course of its rise, reassuring the world that China ‘would never
inflict its past sufferings on anyone else’ (chinadaily.com.cn 2015b).

THE NANJING MASSACRE MEMORIAL

The case study of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial is chosen for several reasons. First,
it is a place of historical significance. Sitting on an actual site of mass slaughter, the
Nanjing Massacre Memorial is one of the ‘monuments to the dead’ (Nora 1996:
307–32), which, as Pierre Nora puts it, are the most obvious and crucial centres of
national memory. Second, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, built on the site of his-
torical trauma, is a site-based museum (Violi 2012), and its existence is of great social
significance. An emblem of China’s wartime sufferings and a major hub of emotions,
it is one of those sites built as ‘places where people could mourn and be seen to mourn’
(Winter 1995: 93). Third, it showcases how collective memory of the War is shaped
and orchestrated by the CPC and the state. An official facility for ideology-centred

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90 Fengqi Qian and Guo-Qiang Liu

activities under the CPC’s direction, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial is affiliated with
the Communication Division of the CPC Nanjing Municipal Committee and one of
the 353 national patriotism education bases across the country, which are designated
by the CPC’s Communication Department. Patriotic education bases are places of
historical significance, which often host patriotic education programmes such as special
excursions for school children. A typical part of a school excursion to the Nanjing
Massacre Memorial is that students must write an essay, after their visit, on a topic
related to patriotism.
In 1982, after the Japanese textbook controversy, Deng Xiaoping and China’s top
leadership decided that a permanent monument should be erected to memorialise the
Nanjing Massacre so as to counteract the Japanese revisionist denial of war crimes (Zhu
and Li 2015). The same year saw excavations at Jiangdongmen, located in the western
suburb of Nanjing. Jiangdongmen was one of the mass burial sites of the Nanjing
Massacre. It was recorded that before Nanjing fell to Japanese invasion, thousands of
refugees had already fled the city and gathered here in the hope of traveling across the
Yangtze River, but the plan was doomed because boats were hardly available. On 12
December 1937, the Chinese defence of Nanjing collapsed, and some 20,000 soldiers,
who had given up resistance, made their way to Jiangdongmen attempting to cross
the Yangtze. The city fell the following day and Jiangdongmen was besieged. On 16
December, the trapped Chinese civilians and soldiers were captured by Japanese troops
and executed over the following days. Their bodies were left unattended for over a
month before being collected and buried by the Red Swastika Society and other charities
in early 1938 (Wang 2002; Zhu 1999). According to the curator in chief of the Nanjing
Massacre Memorial, some of the victims’ bodies were buried in the shell craters left by
Japanese air raids, which then served as convenient graves for mass burial (Zhu 2002:
65). For reasons mentioned earlier, until the early 1980s, none of these burial sites were
brought to public attention, let alone any monuments built in memory of the victims.
In those cases where some of the mass graves were dug open accidentally, local people
would usually rebury or relocate the victims’ bones, to prevent further disturbance to
the deceased. In late 1982, test excavations at Jiangdongmen by specialists from the
Nanjing Cultural Relics Administration led to the opening of one of the burial pits.
Archival research soon confirmed that the conditions of the pit were consistent with
the burial records made in 1938. In the same year, the construction of the Nanjing
Massacre Memorial began, at the site of the excavated mass grave at Jiangdongmen.
The Nanjing Massacre Memorial project was financed mainly by the Nanjing
Municipal Government, with contributions from the China State Administration of
Cultural Heritage as well as the Jiangsu Provincial Government (Jschina.com.cn.2013).
To show the support of the Party and state, Deng paid a visit to Nanjing and hand
wrote the name for the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, which was to be inscribed at its
main entrance. The site was opened to the public on 15 August 1985, the 40th anni-
versary of the Japanese surrender in World War II. The site at this stage was referred
to as Phase One and covered an area of 2.47 hectares, comprising the excavated mass

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grave pit, an interpretative open space and a small exhibition hall, with provision for
future expansion.
A trauma site that exhibits a direct link to the past, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial
maintains, from the very beginning, ‘a real spatial continuity with the trauma itself ’
(Violi 2012: 45). Built on the trauma site, Phase One of the Nanjing Massacre
Memorial was devoted to such a continuity, ‘in an obsessive conservation of past hor-
rors’ (Violi 2012). Every item on the site was installed with the intention of freezing
the past. The design as well as landscape arrangements of the site were unquestion-
ably emotion charged. As its Chief Architect, Professor Qi Kang remarked, ‘under no
circumstance will the building of a commemorative landscape be free from emotions’
(Qi 1997: 26). As such, the core landscape of the site effectively evoked among visitors
feelings of pain, fear and humiliation. It featured a coffin-shaped exhibition hall that
was attached to a rectangular yard covered with white pebbles. According to Professor
Qi, the coffin, the pebbles and the overall landscape were intended to represent death:
the white pebbles would remind viewers of the river beach where the bodies of the
massacre victims had been dumped and also human bones (Qi 1997). Inscribed on the
wall at the main entrance was the figure 300,000, the number of victims that China
claimed, which was an open rebuke to the argument by some Japanese conservatives
that the figure of 300,000 was fabricated.
The Nanjing Massacre Memorial underwent renovations in 1995 and 1997. On
3 September 1995, the then CPC General Secretary Jiang Zemin made a speech at
the general assembly for the 50th anniversary of Victory Day. In his speech, Jiang
repeated China’s claim of the death toll of the Nanjing Massacre, but he also promised
that China would remain committed to upholding world peace and would never seek
hegemony. The Nanjing Massacre Memorial’s interpretation was quickly updated to
comply with these words of Jiang. While continuing its focus on victimhood with
additions of artwork elaborating the barbarism and brutality of Japanese troops, the
narrative began to reach beyond atrocity to pick up some themes of universal value,
in more internationalised expressions, including an English translation of the inter-
pretation. That year, a huge cross and a bell were installed on the site. The former was
inscribed with the dates of the Nanjing Massacre and the latter, named Peace, was a
duplicated version of the one at Peace Park in Hiroshima, Japan. The juxtaposition
of the cross and the bell—representing Christianity and Buddhism, respectively—is
regarded as an effort ‘to weave the specific Nanjing tragedy into a universalist kind of
cultural framework’ (Violi 2012). While the cross may indicate a wish for the dead to
rest in peace, the bell, apart from its religious symbolism, represents a forward-looking
viewpoint, symbolising the Chinese idiom ‘Keep the alarm bell ringing’ (jinzhong
changmin), a warning against repeating past mistakes.
2005 marked the 60th anniversary of China’s victory in the War. In the same year,
the Nanjing Massacre Memorial underwent major extension and renovation. The 2-year
project, referred to as Phase Two, was funded by a special grant of RMB 5.4 hundred
million from the Central Government (Sina.com.cn 2005). The renovation included

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92 Fengqi Qian and Guo-Qiang Liu

site extension, new buildings and additions of artwork. Until now, this extended site
serves as the core interpretative area. The renovation enlarged the site by three times,
to cover several function zones: the exhibition area consisting of a new museum, the
research centre, the assembly square, the historic site including burial pits and victims’
remains and an open space named Peace Park.
The Nanjing Massacre Memorial assumed a completely new look after renova-
tion. More importantly, it reflected the CPC’s view of the War in the new century by
emphasising the Chinese nation as a whole on the one hand, and by internationalising
the case of the Nanjing Massacre on the other. It integrated the memory of Nanjing
Massacre closely with the ‘Century of National Humiliation’ narrative. At the perma-
nent exhibition, the English text of one of the display panels reads: ‘China was poor
and weak in modern times, suffered invasions and enslavement by foreign powers. .
. particularly Japan, which undertook several aggressions of China’s territories (sic.)’.
The ‘Century of National Humiliation’ narrative can be easily deployed to evoke a
collective, emotional response relevant to all Chinese. This shared ‘Chineseness’, and
the bond between mainland Chinese and the Chinese diaspora, in particular those
across the Taiwan Strait, are highlighted in the exhibition. A special section of the
permanent exhibition is dedicated to the national united front. As an acknowledge-
ment of the KMT’s role, the exhibition begins with a multimedia presentation of
KMT-led battles against the Japanese invading troops, followed by the illustrated
biographies of KMT army generals, officers and soldiers. By defending KMT, troops
are presented as both heroes and massacre victims. For example, display panel B19
shows a photo of disarmed KMT soldiers being taken by armed Japanese troops to the
execution grounds. Beside the photo is an excerpt from the diary of Nakajima Kesago,
Commander of the Japanese 16th Division, which recorded the order to ‘dispose of all
captives’. In a quiet corner of the exhibition hall stands a bronze statue of Iris Chang.
Arguably, it was through Chang’s book The Rape of Nanking that the Nanjing Massacre
became widely known in the West. Chang’s contribution to the dissemination of the
memory of the Nanjing Massacre was deeply appreciated in China, so much so that
the Memorial Hall for Zhang Chunru (Iris Chang’s Chinese name) was opened in
2007, in her ancestral hometown Huai’an, 200 km from Nanjing.
Compared with its earlier versions, the current Nanjing Massacre Memorial not
only presents a more comprehensive narration of the War and wartime atrocities, but
also connects closely China’s victimisation in the past, priorities for the present and
aspirations for the future. Obviously, the ‘presentist’ approach to the past is effective
in passing the message across, and the connection among the past, present and future
has obviously been picked up by the audience. For example, a ‘model essay’ published
in an education magazine, written by a grade-five primary school student after an
excursion to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, reads:

I left the Nanjing Massacre Memorial with a heavy heart. I looked up at the sky,
thinking that history had given us too much sorrow. . . Not until our country

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 Remembrance of the Nanjing Massacre in the Globalised Era 93

becomes strong can we see the victims rest in peace. What we can do is not only to
remember the past but also to work for the future and make our country a world
power! (Yang 2016: 40)

The expansion of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial serves the need to internationalise
the memory of China’s victimisation. The exhibition includes testimonies not only
by Chinese but also by international witnesses. One of the sections of the perma-
nent exhibition is devoted to the Nanking International Safety Zone (NISZ) and
its humanitarian operations during the Nanjing Massacre, representing the wartime
ties between China and the international community. NISZ was a non-government,
volunteer-based body set up in December 1937 by foreign expatriates in Nanjing to
provide refuge for the Chinese escaping Japanese atrocities. Its operative committee
was led by John Rabe, an employee of the German company Siemens. It was believed
that Rabe’s background as a member of the Nazi Party enabled him to negotiate with
the Japanese and keep NISZ operating despite constant harassment by Japanese troops.
Rabe returned to Germany in 1938. His diary, which documented those days of horror,
was made known by Iris Chang in The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust. The
diary was subsequently published in 1998 as a book, A Good Man of Nanking: The
Diaries of John Rabe. Due to his Nazi affiliation, John Rabe went through a difficult
time after World War II. Nevertheless, because of what he did to protect Chinese
refugees, Rabe is considered in China as a brave and noble person, equivalent to Oskar
Schindler of Krakow; his former residence in Nanjing has now been listed as a cultural
heritage property under municipal protection. Among those who worked with Rabe
were American missionaries John Magee and Minnie Vautrin. Magee filmed atrocities
during the Nanjing Massacre. In 2001 his son donated the film rolls to the Nanjing
Massacre Memorial, which have been included in the permanent exhibition. Vautrin,
Chair of the education department at Jinling College during the Japanese siege and
massacre, turned the college into a sanctuary for women. Her diaries of that period,
published in 2010, are considered by Chinese historians as a primary source of infor-
mation on Japanese atrocities in Nanjing (Hu and Zhang 2010: 5–10).
China’s assertion of its role as a major ally in World War II is accompanied by its
demand for the global acknowledgement of its wartime sufferings and losses, in par-
ticular its victimisation. The permanent exhibition of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial
is named ‘A Human Holocaust’ (renlei de jienan). According to the Chief Curator, it
was Li Changchun, one of the top CPC leaders, who wanted this wording to replace
the original version ‘The Catastrophe to the Nation’ (minzu de zainan) (Zhu and Li
2015). Violi observes that this wording suggests that the Nanjing Massacre is classified
with Nazi genocide ‘under the same linguistic label’ and that it ‘decontextualise(s) the
historical and local specificity of the two events’ (Violi 2012). Here language functions
as a form of social action. In Ahmed’s view, the repetition of certain words—Ahmed
uses the word ‘Paki’ as an example (2004: 91–92)—has the effect of detaching the word
from its original context, yet the word still carries traces of the context it originally

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94 Fengqi Qian and Guo-Qiang Liu

came from, and the emotions concealed in it become the sign of values and cultural
meanings. The wording indicates, first, the distinction between the victimised ‘us’ (not
only Chinese but the whole civilised world) and barbaric ‘them’. Second, it reflects a
new Chinese perception of the Nanjing Massacre, which holds that, rather than being
just a local incident, it was one of the worst atrocities of World War II, one that has
global significance and deserves global acknowledgement.
Nevertheless, the current version at the same time projects an optimistic view of
Sino-Japanese relations. It attempts to tell the audience (the Chinese in particular)
that, unlike the Japanese militarists and conservative revisionists, the Japanese public
are remorseful for Japan’s wrongdoings in the War. A special case of Azuma Shiro is
presented to illustrate the point. Azuma was a soldier serving in the Japanese-occupying
army in 1937. In 1987, he published part of his wartime diary My Nanking Platoon
in Japan, which was followed by the publication of the full version of the diary,
named The Diary of Azuma Shiro, in Japanese and then the Chinese translation
(Azuma 1999). In 1987, on the 15th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, Azuma
made a special trip to Nanjing to express his remorse to the Massacre victims. In the
following 17 years, Azuma paid six more visits to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial.
Each time, his visit would create a public sensation in Nanjing, and he became one
of the best-known Japanese to Nanjing citizens. Back in Japan, Azuma had to face a
series of lawsuits because of his writings about the Nanjing Massacre. He finally lost
his case, but in China he was regarded as a symbol of integrity of the Japanese public
and was praised by Chinese mainstream media as ‘the Conscience of Japan’ upon his
death (People.com.cn 2006).
In spite of the depiction of the Japanese war crimes, ‘Sino-Japanese friendship’ is
one of the thematic topics of the permanent exhibition, which is highlighted by a
story about the friendship between Chinese General Nie Rongzhen and his ‘Japanese
daughters’—two Japanese war orphans. Nie, who went on to become one of the
founding leaders of the PRC, was Commander in Chief of the Communist-led
Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Military Area during the War. It was reported that, in the midst
of a battle against the Japanese, Nie was informed about two young Japanese sisters
whose parents had been killed in a bombing raid. Nie ordered the girls’ rescue and
then wrote a personal letter for them, ensuring that they would be sent back to the
Japanese army station. Mihoko Kato, the elder of the two sisters, was later sent back
to Japan. In 1980, she paid a special visit to China to reunite with Nie (Chinadaily.
com.cn 2007). The exhibition displays two photos of Mihoko and Nie, one of which
was taken in 1940, soon after she and her sister were rescued, and the other in 1980,
when she visited Nie.
The connection between the past and future is articulated both literally and sym-
bolically, through interpretative objects as well as architectural language, especially
landscaping and artwork. One of the major additions to the original site is an open
space named Peace Park. The spatial arrangement is such that, at the conclusion of
the exhibition, visitors move through the all-dark Meditation Hall before entering the

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Park to see the sunshine. The design team explains that this spatial shift symbolises the
end of China’s century of national humiliation, pointing to an epoch change from a
traumatic past to a peaceful present, with a promising outlook on the future (Shi et al.
2008). Various landscaping elements are used to symbolise this past-future connection.
At the entrance is an imposing sculpture of a Massacre scene: a devastated mother hold-
ing her life-less child; here in Peace Park, one statue, named Peace, is a female figure
with a child in her left arm and a dove in her right hand. Not far from her is Victory,
a military figure of a Chinese soldier (obviously from the Communist army) sounding
a trumpet in a theatrical pose, as if he is charging forward on a battle field. To some,
the juxtaposition of ‘Peace’ and ‘Victory’ seems to represent conflicting values, with
a ‘nationalistic celebration of the greatness of the Chinese people at war’ on the one
hand and ‘the process of pacification and reconciliation with former enemies’ on the
other (Violi 2012). An examination, in an earlier part of this article, of the shaping
and reshaping of the memory of the Nanjing Massacre since China’s opening up has
revealed the logic behind the juxtaposition of these values. What is important here is
the ‘historical lesson’ the CPC has sought to convey to the Chinese people. The lesson
is summarised in a household phrase: ‘Backwardness invites aggression’ (luohou jiu
yao aida), a message distilled from the ‘Century of Humiliation’ narrative and replete
with a set of emotions. It is meant to motivate the nation to work for a modernised,
strong country. In other words, people are told that peace lies in the strength of the
country and the nation and that only when China becomes powerful enough can it
be entitled to justice and afford to exercise forgiveness towards others. To the public,
the masculine figure of the soldier symbolises such a power.
The connection between the memory of China’s victimhood and the notion of ‘Rise
of China’ was further emphasised after the Nanjing Massacre Memorial underwent yet
another extension (Phase Three). This recent addition features a newly built interpre-
tive facility located on the north side of the core area (Phase Two), about one-third
the size of the latter. With a grant of RMB 113 million from the Nanjing Municipal
Government (Njcz.gov.cn 2016), the new facility was completed and opened in 2015,
a year that China celebrated as the 70th anniversary of Victory Day. The development,
indeed, should be viewed in light of the mentality of the current Chinese leadership.
The new exhibition hall (separate from that of Phase Two), with a gigantic red V
installed at the entrance, is named ‘Victory’. The name obviously echoes the tone of
President Xi Jinping’s speech that year. At the celebration of the 70th anniversary of
Victory Day in 2015, Xi concluded his speech to the mass gathering with a rhetorical
flourish—‘Let us bear in mind the great truth of history: Justice will prevail! Peace
will prevail! People will prevail! (sic)’ (Chinadaily.com.cn 2015b).
As its name suggests, the new exhibition is about the memory of China’s victory in
the War. Unlike the Nanjing Massacre exhibition hall, ‘Victory’ starts with a euphoric
narrative, with images and texts showing the Chinese celebrating Victory Day in 1945.
Unsurprisingly, though, the exhibition then takes a solemn turn, from triumph to
victimisation, with a number of sections showing war atrocities by Japanese troops,

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96 Fengqi Qian and Guo-Qiang Liu

not only in Nanjing but also elsewhere in Chinese territories, including the notorious
biological warfare in China’s northeast. Several display panels are devoted to the depic-
tion of the so-called ‘comfort women’ system. In 2014, together with the Documents
of the Nanjing Massacre, China submitted to UNESCO the Documents of Comfort
Women in the War, for the Memory of the World Registry, but the bidding was unsuc-
cessful. Despite the narration of atrocities, however, the theme of victimhood here
seems subordinate to victory, the main theme resonating with the notion of ‘Rise of
China’. It reflects President Xi’s assertion in his speech that victory in the War restored
China’s status as one of the major countries of the world. The theme is expressed in
quite a blunt, graphic manner. For example, the section ‘Justice Done’ contains an
oil painting re-enacting the trial of Tani Hsiao, Commander of the Japanese occupa-
tion troops in Nanjing, at the Nanjing Military Tribunal, where he received death
sentence. In the picture, five Chinese judges look down from a high-raised stage at
the accused who, placed in the cage-like dock, appears dwarfed. A project dedicated
to the 70th anniversary of Victory Day, the new exhibition undoubtedly follows the
state-prescribed tone about the War, suggesting that China has risen from its wartime
ordeal. While the content of the exhibition presents this theme, at the same time, the
modern, sleek exterior of the new complex, the lavish building details as well as the
state-of-the-art, high-definition media set-up send the same message.

CONCLUSION

This article investigates the development and the transmission of the collective memory
of China’s wartime victimisation, particularly the Nanjing Massacre. It argues that this
is contextual to the notion of China’s rise. This memory, loaded with a strong, collec-
tive emotion, is a process orchestrated by the CPC according to its priorities at various
stages and reflects an official view of the world order. While the ‘collective amnesia’
about the Nanjing Massacre had much to do with China’s isolation in the Cold War
years, the development and transmission of the memory about it have coincided with
China’s opening up and rise as a world power in the new era.
This article argues that the memory of victimhood is deployed to serve the CPC
and the government’s internal and external agendas. Internally, this memory lies in the
core of the ‘Century of National Humiliation’ narrative, which is used by the CPC to
build new nationalism in response to the ideological void after it disposed of Mao’s
doctrine of class struggle. The memory of victimhood is instrumental for the CPC to
strengthen national coherence and to promote a shared identity between all Chinese,
especially people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The victim mentality, expressed
in the term ‘backwardness invites aggressions’, nurtures a national aspiration for a
stronger country, which is now translated as ‘China Dream’. As William Callahan has
noted, the ‘fall to rise’ logic behind China’s new nationalism is based on the discourse

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of national humiliation—‘the narrative of national salvation depends upon national

humiliation’—which involves a notion of history and recovery (Callahan 2004).
Externally, the victim narrative is instrumental in China’s pursuit of its global
interests in a few respects: first, it gives China the moral high ground in the bilateral
relationship with Japan. As Wan points out, ‘when it comes to Japan, a victimisation-
based identity prevails to explain Beijing’s strategic goals and approach’ (Wan 2006:
156). The Nanjing Massacre Memorial’s interpretation shows a binary of the barbarism
of Japanese militarists, on the one hand, and China’s dignity and moral superiority on
the other, with victims’ narrations and the story about General Nie and his ‘Japanese
daughters’. Second, by disseminating to the outside world the case of its victimhood,
China aims to support the notion of its ‘peaceful rise’, to convince the world that it will
never inflict on others the sufferings that it has undergone in the past. Third, under
the current leadership, China has become more assertive about its self-presentation as
one of the world’s major countries whose rights are not to be overlooked. The case of
the Nanjing Massacre serves China’s demand for the world’s acknowledgement of its
contributions and losses during World War II and its claim of authority in the region
as well as in the world.
The building, renovation and extension of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial since
1985 have not only enlarged the size of the property but, more importantly, updated its
interpretation of War memory, in accordance with the direction of the Party line. The
fact that the Nanjing Massacre Memorial is affiliated with the CPC shows that it must
transmit, and has transmitted, the CPC’s view of the War in the new century. At the
Nanjing Massacre Memorial a Chinese motto is engraved on the wall: ‘History, if not
forgotten, can guide the future’ (qian shi bu wang, hou shi zhi shi). The motto is cited to
underscore the connection between past victimhood and future peace/harmony. What
connects them? The Chinese people are told that it is a lesson which says ‘backwardness
invites aggressions’, drawn from the ‘Century of National Humiliation’. The rhetoric
does not go without external controversy though—for example, Yoshida remarks that
the Nanjing Massacre Memorial’s interpretation endorses a ‘just-war theory’ instead
of renouncing all wars (Yoshida 2014: 205). Should there be other lessons and if so,
what are they? These questions are worth exploring.
Collective memory is a mnemonic process that starts from individuals and therefore
is charged with strong personal emotions, and it is in turn capable of evoking strong
emotions in the public. The interpretation of the Nanjing Massacre is inevitably emo-
tion charged—to borrow a term coined by David Uzzel, it is a ‘hot interpretation’
(Uzzel 1987). The collectiveness of emotions associated with the Nanjing Massacre
generates social effects as a form of alignment and therefore it is intrinsically political.
It functions cohesively on the one hand yet divisively on the other. Okabe Tatsumi,
an expert in Sino-Japanese relations, suggests that in historical remembering, a two-
by-two matrix applies, which consists of rational/emotional and personal/collective
columns (Okabe 2001). The matrix may lead to various possible outcomes, depend-
ing on how the factors involved are configured. The challenge is, therefore, to allow

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98 Fengqi Qian and Guo-Qiang Liu

the personal/collective emotions to vent without encouraging a ‘collective emotional

memory’ between peoples. Also challenging is the question of how historical lessons
can be learnt without being hijacked by nationalistic emotions. In this sense, the revela-
tion and investigation of the interrelations between the victim narrative and the ‘Rise
of China’ discourse are significant in the new era, now seen as the ‘Asian Century’.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publica-
tion of this article.

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