State, market, and the manufacturing of war memory: China’s television dramas on the War of Resistance against Japan

Abstract

Remembering the War of Resistance against Japan is central to China’s memory and identity politics. By focusing on the production of China’s War of Resistance television dramas, this study analyzes how collective memory is shaped by market actors and their interactions with the state. The first substantive section investigates how commercial media and the state cooperate in the production of War of Resistance television dramas. The second explicates how market actors undermine the state’s ideological imperatives by adding entertainment content to repackage war memory, which then conflicts with the propagandistic task. This study contributes to introducing the market factor to research on the remembering of War of Resistance in China and enriching the political economy of memory approach by examining an authoritarian state-capitalist case, which is centrally characterized by these cooperative and conflictual relations between the state and the market.