Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China by Linh D. Vu

Abstract

Reviewed by: Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China by Linh D. Vu Daniel Asen Linh D. Vu. Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. 281 pp. Hardcover ($49.95) or e-book. In Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China, Linh D. Vu examines the questions of “how and why a nation cares about its dead” (2) for a period of Chinese history stretching from the founding of the Republic to the Nanjing Decade, Second Sino-Japanese War, and Chinese Civil War. Vu’s approach is wide-ranging: readers will learn about the narratives and textual genres through which successive early twentieth-century Chinese regimes elevated political martyrs and constructed narratives of national history, the ways in which the state attempted to influence death ritual in order to claim political authority, and the bureaucratic regulations and procedures through which relatives of the war dead were compensated amid expanding domestic military conflict. This book is meant for a wide readership in modern Chinese history. It contains material that will be of interest to those who work in political and military history, social history, and cultural history. Vu’s attention to the details of compensation regulations and the process through which relatives of the dead sought benefits might also be of interest to those who study Republican civil law, given that these issues were so often related to how familial relations were defined in law and social practice. Notably, Vu is attentive to the societal and cultural impacts of wartime mass death and its commemoration in other historical contexts, such as in the United States during the American Civil War and in Europe after the First World War. This attention to the global history of death commemoration—as well as the book’s use of “necrocitizenry” and “necropolitics” as framing concepts, discussed below—suggests the possibility that scholars who work on similar issues in other times and places will find in Vu’s study a useful comparative case. Chapter 1 examines how the anti-Qing Yellow Flower Hill uprising of April 1911 was commemorated under the Nanjing Provisional Government, the regime of Yuan Shikai, and the Nationalist state of the early 1920s. Vu shows that these regimes’ efforts to claim legitimacy by commemorating anti-Qing revolutionaries imbued this uprising with new meanings as a symbol of national identity and unity, Confucian virtue, and partyled revolutionary martyrdom. Chapter 2 turns to the Nanjing Decade and the Nationalist state’s efforts to commemorate and lay claim to a broad range of “martyrs,” including anti-Qing reformers and revolutionaries, Nationalist military personnel who died fighting the forces of the Chinese Communist Party or Japan, and even bureaucrats who died of “overexertion.” The Nationalist government used the memory of these revered figures to augment the narrative of its own indispensable role in China’s recent history and to assert its political legitimacy as the inheritor of the Republic. Chapter 3 examines how relatives of those who were recognized as martyrs interacted with the bureaucracy that provided death benefits in the form of stipends, tuition [End Page E-12] assistance, and burial assistance. Vu shows that in practice this compensation system involved inconsistent regulations, a poorly defined financial base (which relied on local governments’ willingness to follow national compensation policies), and discontent among families who did not receive the benefits for which they petitioned. In chapter 4, Vu examines how widows and other female relatives of martyrs petitioned for compensation, the gendered subject-positions that they claimed for themselves in doing so, and the somewhat ambivalent forms of agency that these interactions with the state involved. Vu argues that, while such women were active agents in engaging the state’s compensation system, their petitioning strategies tended to invoke and thus reinforce “traditional wifely virtues of sacrifice and perseverance” (118). Similar tropes were also deployed in the commemoration of women who died while fighting or resisting the enemy. Chapter 5 examines how the prospect of “mass martyrization” (156) during the Second Sino-Japanese War led to ever-finer compensation regulations and procedures, expanded efforts to collect martyrs’ stories and compile...