Remembering and Forgetting Massacres in China: Japanese, Manchus, and the China Dream

The Sigur Center for Asian Studies presents Antonia Finnane, professor of history at the University of Melbourne with research interests in China from late imperial to contemporary times.

How does the Nanjing Massacre serve Beijing politics? When Xi Jinping visited Nanjing to preside over the ceremony for the first National Day of Mourning on 13 December 2014, he not only took national awareness of the massacre to new heights, but created a national event out of a local one. His ‘dream’ of a rejuvenated China was duly inscribed on the commemorative cauldron created for the NDM, with specific reference in the text to the ‘Japanese bandits invading China’. In striking contrast to the attention given to Japanese invaders in contemporary China, near silence reigns over massacres committed by an earlier wave of invaders, the Manchus. Although they took place long ago, these massacres were keenly ‘remembered’ during anti-Manchu nationalist agitation in the early twentieth century. The present government, however, is nearly as sensitive to anti-Manchu references as the Qing government once was. Comparing treatments of these different massacres suggests that the realisation of the dream depends on forgetting Manchu massacres as much as on remembering Japanese; i.e. on maintaining internal unity while strengthening the demarcation between China and non-China.

Antonia Finnane is a professor of history at the University of Melbourne with research interests in China from late imperial to contemporary times. She is visiting the George Washington University Museum to deliver a talk on ‘Daily Dress in Late Qing China: Spotting the Difference Between Manchu and Han’ as part of the symposium Picturing China: Qing-Dynasty Photography and Fashion. Antonia is the author of Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550-1850 (Harvard Asia Center, 2004), winner of the 2006 Levenson Prize for a book on pre-modern China; and Changing Clothes in China (Columbia UP 2008), among other works. She is currently researching small shops and handicraft industry in 1950s Beijing.

Light refreshments will be provided.

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