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Conspicuous Silence: Veterans and the Depoliticization of War Memory in China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2011

NEIL J. DIAMANT
NEIL J. DIAMANT*
Affiliation:
Dickinson College, Department of Political Science, PO Box 1773, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 17013, USA Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper explores the unusually weak voice of Chinese war veterans in post-1949 politics society and culture. Although Chinese movies and television often feature military-related themes, it is rare to find frank and politicized depictions of China's military conflicts. In this respect, China departs sharply from the former Soviet Union—China's Leninist model for most of its formative years—as well as Vietnam, European inter-war fascist regimes and democracies. This paper argues that the relative weakness of authentic military voices in China can be traced to several peculiar features of modern Chinese history. The nature of warfare in China, as well as the absence of a national army, veteran organizations and a consensus over the legitimacy about China's wars, has led many to question the validity of veterans’ claims for a higher political and cultural status. Rather than allow veterans the space to portray war as they experienced it, intellectual elites in various cultural and propaganda offices dominate national war memory, presenting a simplistic and artificial rendering of China's wars.

Type
Part II: Remembering China's War with Japan: The Wartime Generation in Post-war China and East Asia
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 2: China in World War II, 1937–1945: Experience, Memory, and Legacy , March 2011 , pp. 431 - 461
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

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4 Personal communication with Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley.

5 For this story see Jacobs, A. (2009). China is Wordless on Traumas of Communists’ Rise, The New York Times (1 October).

6 Although these wars have different names and occurred years apart, there were soldiers who fought in two or even three of them on the Communist side. There were also soldiers who fought for the GMD, switched over to the Communists during the Civil War, and were then dispatched to fight in Korea. Unlike Western practices which label veterans by the wars they fought, the documents in Chinese archives are vague about time and place. For instance, the term fuyuan junren (复 员 军 人) is generally employed for soldiers in the wars against Japan (during World War II), the GMD, the US and Vietnam, while the term qiyi junren (起 义 军 人) is sometimes used for former GMD soldiers during the Civil War (who then became fuyuan junren after Korea).

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