Reclaiming War Memory: Vernacular Museums and the Reincorporation of Marginalized Veterans in Contemporary China

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 3. Memory Politics & National Narratives

Abstract

How do previously marginalized groups become reincorporated into mainstream national narratives when the state that once excluded them remains in power? In mainland China, previously silent memories have been selectively reintegrated, not through regime change or direct state initiative, but through grassroots commemorative practices. This occurs within what we term “constrained pluralism”: political contexts in which the state tolerates civic memory initiatives that align with nationalist objectives while maintaining red lines against challenges to regime legitimacy. In the early 2000s, Kuomintang (KMT) veterans, soldiers who fought Fascist forces during World War II but spent decades politically marginalized due to their service to the Nationalist government defeated in China’s civil war, began reemerging in museums, media coverage, and public ceremonies. By 2015, these once-silenced veterans were being publicly honored as “patriotic heroes” and “defenders of the nation”, their wartime sacrifices reintegrated into China’s mainstream War of Resistance narrative. This article examines the curatorial and narrative mechanisms through which grassroots museums recode veterans from contested actors into publicly recognized figures within national memory. Based on archival analysis and fieldwork conducted at civilian-run War of Resistance museums, the findings suggest that grassroots museums navigate this challenge through strategic narrative individualization. Rather than foregrounding collective partisan identity, curatorial practices selectively bracket explicit KMT political markers while centering personal biographies of suffering, sacrifice, and national loyalty. These individual stories function as vessels for collective recognition: by narrating each veteran’s personal sacrifice as an expression of shared national belonging, museums generate bottom-up emotional identification that accumulates into group-level rehabilitation without directly confronting state-imposed political boundaries. In doing so, they reveal a negotiated process of mnemonic incorporation under conditions of constrained pluralism.

Authors

• Kaiqing She, New York University

• Yourong Yao, Nanyang Technological University