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part iv Women, Memory, and China’s War of Resistance against Japan Scholars recognize that memory is constructed, not reproduced; with changes of circumstances and people’s outlook, memories change as well.1 More importantly, the construction and reshaping of memories often serves a present need and circumstance—memories can be manipulated and are also often used as political vehicles. For example, in a study of Frederick Douglass, David Thelen argues that “Frederick Douglass fought for thirty years to keep alive among northern whites the memory of the Civil War as an emancipatory struggle. That memory, Douglass believed, was the freedmen ’s best weapon for resisting southern white schemes to establish more oppressive race relations.”2 The scholarly treatment of the memory of China’s War of Resistance is no exception. In their study of how the war has been remembered in the past sixty years, scholars all point out that the collective act of remembering the war is political and manipulated by China’s ruling elites for creating situational meanings to serve political purposes in a given historical period.3 For example, Yinan He suggests that during the 1950s to 1970s, China, because of geostrategic considerations, “avoided history disputes with Japan” over the war. However, for domestic political reasons, in the early 1980s Beijing started to “attack Japanese historical memory and promote assertive nationalism through patriotic history propaganda, which radicalized Chinese popular views about Japan.”4 Other scholars more or less share He’s assessment and believe that in the past sixty years there have been state-sponsored official master narratives of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Even though the narratives are never monolithic, nevertheless the “there and then” wartime i-xii_1-220_Li.indd 176 8/13/09 3:19:35 PM women, memory, and china’s war of resistance · 177 memories are aimed at serving “here and now” political purposes. Several more recent studies also suggest that since the launch of China’s economic reforms there developed a state-sponsored “new remembering” of the war in China to accommodate China’s new nationalism.5 Unfortunately, as Parks M. Coble points out, oral histories and private memories are not a big part of the “new remembering,” and because of that Coble fears that future studies on China’s War of Resistance will remain “strikingly impersonal—the story of the nation not of the individual.”6 Chongqing women’s recovered memories recorded in this book, which have never been part of the master narrative of the war, are the missing personal stories of the war. Chongqing women’s recollections of the war not only provide us with information about the history of the individuals in the region during the war but also contribute to our understanding of the history of the nation at war. More importantly, women’s oral accounts force us to notice that there are different approaches in examining the act of remembering the war in China. While Coble’s, He’s, Mitter’s, and Waldron’s analyses use the approach of “chrono-politics of memories” developed by Carol Gluck, suggesting that memory of the war in China varies significantly in different historical periods, Philip West in his study of Chinese counter-narratives of the Asia Pacific War uses the idea of “loco-politics of memory,” suggesting that memory of the war in China varies widely depending on which place we are discussing.7 Norman Smith’s study of Manchuria, Poshek Fu’s study of Shanghai, Joshua Fogel’s study of the Lower Yangzi region, and my study of the Chongqing region in this book demonstrate that each place has a different legacy of memory. We need to be careful in making generalizations about the “Chinese memory.”8 Oral recollections in this book also force us to think about the “gender politics of memories,” recognizing that memories of the war in China vary between the state-sponsored masculine master narrative and ordinary women ’s feminist private memories, and that for a long time when the politics of memories were dominated by the masculine state, and when ruling elites erased women’s private memories as a social category from the master narrative , they also silenced women’s voices. The politics of memories is powerfully linked with the politics of knowledge construction. When women’s memories are erased and voices are silenced, their experiences and viewpoints are not included in the knowledge of the war or the process of producing new knowledge about the history of the war. Understanding the...

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