Forgetting and Othering: Representing the War of Resistance

Abstract

A & Q 15 6 Works Cited Field, Norma. 1991. In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End. New York: Pantheon Books. Field, Norma. 1997. “War and Apology: Japan, Asia, the Fiftieth, and After.” positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 5, no. 1: 1–­ 51. Iwasaki, Minoru, and Steffi Richter. 2008. “The Topology of Post-­ 1990s Historical Revisionism.” Translated by Richard F. Calichman.positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 16, no. 3: 507–­ 38. Kwan, SanSan. 2013. KinestheticCity:DanceandMovementinChineseUrban Spaces. New York: Oxford University Press. Sontag, Susan. 1977. OnPhotography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Yoneyama, Lisa. 2016. Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American JusticeandJapaneseWarCrimes. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Forgetting and Othering: Representing the War of Resistance Xiaojue Wang Remembering and forgetting are both human capacities and techniques of engaging with the past. They interact in many ways. As memory studies scholars have well noted, remembering and forgetting are not inherently good or bad, and their meanings depend on the specific social and cultural frames within which they are constructed (Assmann 1996; Reemtsma 2010). When it comes to wartime conflict and trauma, however, forgetting is often dismissed, if not reproached, as the malignant other of remembering , especially when related to revisionist denial and intentional evasion by the perpetrators. It is often claimed that forgetting is something that needs to be resisted . The front wall of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall completed in 1985 bears the inscription “Victims 300,000” in simplified and traditional Chinese and in English, and the inscription on the inner wall features four Chinese characters—­ 勿忘国耻—­ meaning “Never Forget National Humiliation.” These four characters have been inscribed in many other materials—­ bronze or marble—­ and in many other forms of Chinese calligraphy in historical museums and on memorials and monuments burgeoning since the 1980s. The inscription alerts the visitors to the peril of forgetting and pointedly suggests that “forgetting” itself is an essential source of this peril. The urge to establish a monument out of materials of permanence points not merely to the importance of 16 A & Q remembering or the monumental weight of history but even more to the difficulty of remembering and the impermanent, volatile nature of remembrance. Furthermore, what to remember, and what to forget, is a process of selection. The selective criteria are set by the sponsor of the memorials, in this case, the official Chinese government. It is as if the petrified stone could not articulate the exact message, therefore the necessity to engrave written words to specify in an unmistakable manner the precise message of the memorial. “Never Forget National Humiliation” is evidently a crucial part of the official discourse of patriotic education that was initiated during Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform of the 1980s, which aimed at modernizing and revitalizing China.1 Forgetting national humiliation is considered as a menace hampering modernization and leading to a weak nation and hence as a negative, despicable mode of dealing with the past. In response to the questions raised in this A&Q, particularly how the politics of forgetting affected postwar epistemologies of Asia that continued to shape the region and the globe, I will examine the representational strategies of forgetting and othering in the PRC narratives of China’s War of Resistance against Japan (1937–­ 45) during the Cold War era. I had begun this essay thinking about the sudden memory boom in the 1980s, which brought Japanese war atrocities back to the “terrain of official commemoration” (Gluck 2007) in the PRC. Given that this occurred at a moment when the Cold War started to thaw and China developed better regional and international relations, one might ask, Why now? What of the oblivion of Japanese war crimes for more than thirty years since 1949? How did forgetting shape China’s new image and changing political alignments in global Asia? Forgetting was used as a necessary narrative technology when the new Chinese government set out to write its history of socialist revolution , accentuating the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (the CCP) in guiding the Chinese people to the nation’s final victory. Ernest Renan’s well-­known 1882 statement that “forgetting . . . is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” remains true here...