In recent decades, the role of Second World War memories in East Asian regional politics has attracted scholars' attention.Footnote 1 The most prominent cases pertaining to China include the debate over the Japanese prime minister's visits to Yasukuni Shrine, the contested memories of the Nanjing Massacre, the 2005 anti-Japanese demonstrations, and the decade-long reparations litigation against Japan. Since wars and war memories are fundamental to nation-states and nationalism,Footnote 2 these issues converge with the heated discussions about Chinese nationalism and the “rise of China.”Footnote 3
Much has been learned about the Chinese government's mythological and strategic use of the past through constructing historic narratives and establishing commemorative sites. Memories of the anti-Japanese war, the studies suggest, are used as a bargaining chip in diplomatic negotiations with JapanFootnote 4 and as a convenient tool to construct legitimacy that can no longer be provided by the fading communism.Footnote 5 Less has been studied and theorized, however, about how official war memories generate discursive opportunity for citizens' political participation and how their actions are enabled and constrained by their dynamic relations to governments at different levels and regions. Until these issues are addressed, politics of the war memories as a large-scale social phenomenon cannot be adequately understood.
This article intends to redress this imbalance by studying one of the most influential cases, the Chinese war reparations movement between 1991 and 2007 (duiRi suopei yundong 对日索赔运动, CWRM), in which Second World War victims demanded reparations from Japan. This case is significant and intriguing not only because it is the most persistent Chinese social movement based on collective memory (more than a decade) but also because its trajectory and variation enable us to see memory politics at different levels of society. Our study draws on data collected from ethnographic research in addition to conducting a conventional textual analysis. We propose a “dynamic statism” to account for the variations that cannot be adequately explained by previous studies. Why, among the six major movement sectors in the CWRM, did some sectors develop better than others? Why did the sectors with more governmental support not always develop well? What does this variation tell us about the state–society relationship in contemporary China?
Memory Politics and the State–Society Relationship
A traditional approach to politics of memory is to highlight the role of the state.Footnote 6 The formation and development of modern nation-states is intertwined with discovering ethnic roots and forging national identity,Footnote 7 inventing a tradition to legitimize itself, especially when the state is newly formed or in a transition period,Footnote 8 and, in extreme cases, as George Orwell vividly describes in 1984, “controlling” the present by controlling the past.Footnote 9 It has also been indicated that authoritarian and totalitarian states tend to be more interested in and capable of manipulating commemorations, rituals and other forms of symbolic politics.Footnote 10
Most current studies of contemporary Chinese memory politics follow this line by focusing on intentions and strategies of the Chinese government's use of war memories. They attend to three aspects of war memories: as domestic legitimation, as a diplomatic strategy, and as narratives embodied in texts and commemorative sites. For example, one of the most recent and representative studies, Yinan He's research on war memory and international politics in China,Footnote 11 examines how the Chinese government exploited memories of the anti-Japanese war to enhance domestic legitimacy and obtain diplomatic leverage. This manipulation of memory stirred radical nationalistic sentiments and a one-sided view of Japan among the young generation. Therefore, the anti-Japanese nationalist movement since the 1990s has been a result of the state's propaganda and “patriotic education.” Studies of historical narratives and commemorative sites, such as war memorials and museums, also stress the state's explicit or implicit strategy of either mythologizing heroic history or constructing victimhood.Footnote 12 Similar arguments with different degrees of emphasis on the state's symbolic functions can be found in studies of Chinese nationalism and the anti-Japanese protests, both of which are based on war memories.Footnote 13 These studies have enriched our understanding of memory politics as a way of establishing hegemony of the state.
On the other hand, war memory issues in contemporary China, as in many other places in the world, are usually translated into political action at society level, such as small- and large-scale demonstrations against Japan, online protests, and social movements. We already have adequate knowledge about the government's role in memory issues, but we know less about how and why the state-forged memories lead to different patterns of political action in different contexts and what these variations reveal about the Chinese state–society relationship.
Methodologically, scholars rely almost exclusively on discourses of the past that are embodied in texts, arts, and commemorative sites. These sources of data might be valid to investigate the state's intentions and propaganda strategies, as well as political processes at the international level, but they may not adequately explain Chinese nationalism and memory politics as an influential social phenomenon. A few studies of memory and nationalism do use textual data from non-state media, popular books and online discussions, and hence give more room for voices different from the official discourses.Footnote 14 We follow them and develop this line of research by using ethnographic data to examine memory politics as collective actions instead of as pure discourses.
Following the recent trend in collective memory study that shifts the research subject from “memory” to “mnemonic practices,”Footnote 15 our study focuses more on Chinese citizens' participation in memory politics and their nuanced relationships with the state. The best way to address this issue, we believe, is to marry collective memory to state–society interactions in social movement theories and Chinese politics literature. Specifically, we build our study on a more flexible and situational view of the political opportunity structure (POS).Footnote 16 We follow a “dynamic statism,” a view that stresses the dynamics and variations in the state–society relationship. This approach “allows us to specify political opportunity for different actors and sectors, to track its changes over time, and to place the analysis of social movements in their increasingly transnational setting.”Footnote 17 Scholars working on Chinese contentious politics also cherish this approach without using this theoretical label.Footnote 18 They indicate that, even in an authoritarian context, the state–society relationship is layered and varies across regions, and local government and movements have more leeway on some issues than others.Footnote 19 We want to extend this conventional wisdom to the issue of memory politics. The new thing we add to the literature is that we see state-constructed memory as the discursive aspect of POS,Footnote 20 examining crevices and “grey zones” between the ideological and organizational aspects of POS. All these are realized in situation-specific interactions between the movement and the state. This dynamic and differential feature of POS finally leads to sector variation in a single case of collective memory movement.
The following sections illustrate these theoretical points in the empirical case of the CWRM, which consists of several sectors with different degrees of development.
The Case and Methods: The Chinese War Reparations Movement
The Chinese war reparations movement is deeply rooted in the history and memory of the Second World War. In 1972, when normalizing its diplomatic relationship with Japan, the People's Republic of China gave up official claims for war reparations in a joint communiqué with Japan. In the early 1990s, a few Chinese activists asserted that Chinese citizens have the right to demand compensation from Japan because they believed the communiqué could be applied only to state reparations but not to individual citizens. Those activists mobilized victims and supporters and petitioned to change foreign policy, urging the government to clarify the issue, or, more precisely, to confirm their claims. Nevertheless, these attempts were not successful.Footnote 21
Around 1995, some new activists filed a series of lawsuits against the Japanese government and the corporations that used forced labour during the war. This proved a turning point for the CWRM, and since then the movement has grown rapidly. Some Japanese lawyers affiliated with the Japanese Peace Movement contributed to this new phase of activities by searching for Chinese Second World War victims and encouraging them to sue Japan. They worked with local and national activists, most of whom are lawyers, historians and volunteer activists. The movement declined and almost came to a halt after April 2007, when the Japanese Supreme Court ruled that all reparations cases from China should be rejected according to the Court's interpretation of the 1972 Sino-Japanese communiqué.
We began to be interested in this movement in 2006 and started our research by collecting textual data. The first author also conducted a two-month (June to July 2007), interview-based ethnographic study in several locations in China where the CWRM occurs. He conducted 24 formal, recorded individual interviews and numerous informal interviews, such as casual conversations over dinner.Footnote 22 In the formal interviews, the respondents were asked about their demographic information, their engagement in the movement and their narratives about relationships with other parties in the movement. He also conducted two focus group interviews with victims and activists in two locations,Footnote 23 as well as participant observations of some events.Footnote 24 We want to highlight the necessity of the field study to our project not only because many nuances in state–society interactions are unavailable in public sources but also because fieldwork can keep theorizing “close to the ground.”Footnote 25 Before, during and after the fieldwork, we also collected various types of textual data: media reports in both English and ChineseFootnote 26; several Chinese books focusing on the movement, including documentary history and scholarly discussions of legal issuesFootnote 27; online reports and discussions in some websites and an email listservFootnote 28; and unpublished documents collected during the fieldwork, such as pamphlets, flyers, self-printed texts, copies of petitioning letters, name lists of members, investigation working manuals, meeting minutes and pictures. We cross-checked published and unpublished texts, Chinese sources and non-Chinese sources, and, most importantly, field study data and textual data to present a circumstantial and systematic account of the movement.
This article focuses on one of the most intriguing features of the CWRM after 1995, its internal variations across six major movement sectors. Each sector includes one or more lawsuits about an alleged atrocity: the bacterial weapon victims' case in Yiwu 义乌, Zhejiang provinceFootnote 29; the bacterial weapon victims' case in Changde 常德, Hunan provinceFootnote 30; the forced labourers' cases in north China; the “comfort women” case; the Chongqing indiscriminate bombing case; and the chemical weapon victims' case in north-east China. Some of these sectors developed better than others.Footnote 31 The bacterial weapon cases in Yiwu and Changde, in which a considerable number of activists and victims organized well-functioning social movement organizations (SMOs), were the most developed. Their financial situations were better than those of other cases, although the two cases differed from each other in the ways in which they raised funds. Compared to these two well-developed cases, the Chongqing indiscriminate bombing case has an SMO, but it has suffered from constant internal conflicts, schisms and lack of financial support. Other cases, the “comfort women,” the forced labourers and the chemical weapons, have neither functioning SMOs nor a large number of regular participants (see Table 1).
Table 1: Outcome Variation of the CWRM after 1995
One might also be surprised by the absence of the most widely known case in the war memories: the Nanjing Massacre, which had the greatest number of victims and the strongest government support, but no reparations movement.Footnote 32 Thus, the Massacre becomes a “negative case,”Footnote 33 which needs an explanation beyond official memories and discourses.
Given that the collective memory issues these sectors act on all belong to the same war memory discourse, in which the government has the same hegemonic interest, what can account for the variation across the sectors? To what extent is the variation linked to both discursive and institutional aspects of POS and their dynamics? The next section describes our empirical findings of the factors related to this variation, and then explains them by raising three propositions.
Empirical Findings
We raise three propositions to explain this variation. First, the “ambivalence proposition”: the ideological profits in the CWRM lured the Chinese state, but at the same time it wanted to contain the threat of collective actions. Second, the “grey zone” proposition: the central government's ambivalent attitude created a “grey zone” for local governments in the places where the CWRM occurred. Local governments could improvise their strategies for dealing with the movement. Third, the “upside-down U-shaped proposition”: while the government's strong support or repression discouraged civil society's participation, its co-operative strategy or absenteeism facilitated the sectors. In other words, instead of formulating the memory movement's development as a linear function of the state's repression-facilitation spectrum and/or discursive strategies, the findings in this article suggest an approximately upside-down U-shaped relation between the two.
Ambivalence
The central government has never had a written document about whether or not the 1972 communiqué article about reparations excludes individual citizens' right to demand compensation.Footnote 34 Yet, as most scholars have correctly observed, the state desired to exploit the discourses of nationalism and victimhood in the reparations issues and related collective memories of the Sino-Japanese War (1931–45). At the same time, it was cautious about the movement for two reasons. First, any collective action aggravated the state and threatened “stability”; second, even if the target was the Japanese state, the Chinese state would probably find itself being blamed for failing to take a strong stance in the bilateral relationship. At the first stage of the CWRM, the activists petitioned the Foreign Affairs Office and the National People's Congress to change its policy towards Japan. This strategy disturbed the state's agenda and invited suppression.Footnote 35
After 1995 the movement's action strategy transformed from petitioning the Chinese state to taking legal action against the Japanese state. This “turning-outward” strategy significantly lowered the level of threats, and state–society interactions began unfolding mainly at the local level, between local governments (or agents of the central government) and the movement, and in transnational legal activism. Yet, evidence demonstrates that the state still held an ambiguous attitude towards the movement. Textual analysis of reports in the People's Daily shows that among the 34 relevant reports, there was only one marginal mention of reparations movement organizations. Ethnographic evidence supports this, too. For example, none of the SMOs gained an official status (that is none was registered with the Bureau of Civil Affairs).Footnote 36 Another example is more discursive. Chongqing's victims organization was forced to change its name from the Chongqing Bombing Victims' Demanding Reparations Organization (Chongqing dahongzha shouhaizhe suopei tuan 重庆大轰炸受害者索赔团) to the Chongqing Bombing Victims' Demanding Reparations Case (Chongqing dahongzha shouhaizhe suopei an 重庆大轰炸受害者索赔案), which does not sound like an organizational name and gives an impression that the victims are not “organizing” (gao zuzhi 搞组织).Footnote 37 Many interviewees also complained that National Security agents attended their meetings. However, the monitoring and constraints should not be overestimated. Most SMOs run without official status. As one of our informants explained: “Well, to permit you to exist already shows the government's attitude.”Footnote 38
The grey zone
A significant effect of this ambivalence is that the crevice between discursive and institutional dimensions created a “grey zone” in which local governments have a range of action options beyond the simple dichotomy of repression and facilitation. Local governments often received contradictory and vague signals from the central government. In most cases, a typical message was a hint, such as “Go ahead but be careful,”Footnote 39 while in a few, the central government bypassed the local government and intervened through their agents. But it was usually the case that the central government's ambivalence created a “grey zone” that enabled local governments to decide on their own strategies to pursue their own interests. They could either suppress the movement for the sake of “stability,” or encourage it for the sake of “patriotic education,” or employ more subtle strategies to use the movement for their own purposes.
We measured the government's involvement by several indicators: whether it financially supported the movement; whether it or state organizations organized the SMOs; whether it sent personnel to the SMOs; and whether it facilitated, permitted, restricted or forbade their activities. We argue that local governments adopted five major action strategies.
First, “takeover” (in the chemical weapon and forced labourers cases). The government, either central or local, organized the SMO or did not allow SMOs at all. The major activists were assigned by the government, and non-governmental activists were not present or played only a minor role. The government was the major financial source, or there was no alternative when government funding was not available. However, the cases are used discursively by the state media.
Second, “co-operation” (in Changde). Along with governmental representatives, non-governmental activists were active in the SMO. The government financially and institutionally supported the movement but did not directly organize it. This strategy was usually adopted by local governments.
Third, “absenteeism” (in Yiwu). The local government provided the movement with no or very little financial support. The SMO was organized by non-governmental activists, and there were no governmental officials in it. Activists were allowed to engage in activities with very little government interference.
Fourth, “control” (in the “comfort women” case). The SMO was allowed to exist but was strictly monitored and restricted by the central and local governments. The government did not send personnel to the SMO but did not provide financial support either.
And finally, “suppression” (in Chongqing). SMOs were either banned or strictly controlled. Their activities were sometimes banned or at least not reported by the official media. Both central and local governments could adopt this strategy. Discursively, the cases are strictly controlled on state media; sometimes the reports on them are even banned.
An upside-down U-shaped co-variation
If this spectrum is compared to the degree of development, there is a non-linear relationship between the state's strategies and variation in the development of the sectors. In fact, it looks like an upside-down U-shaped co-variation model (see Figure 1). The local government's support and involvement did lead to a well-developed sector in Changde, but the strong presence of the central and local governments in the chemical weapon and forced labourers cases did not. The government's “control” and “suppression” impeded Chongqing and the “comfort women” case, yet they were still slightly better than the cases with the government's “takeover” strategies. Yiwu, with very little government support, developed best among these sectors.
Figure 1: Upside-down, U-Shaped Co-Variation
What can account for this seemingly puzzling co-variation model? In the rest of this section, we will use rich empirical evidence to reveal the mechanisms underlying this co-variation. First, we analytically determine the major actors in the local contexts, such as local governments, sometimes agents of the central government and activists. Then we analyse their social positions, resources and mutual relationships.
We start our analysis from the sectors that developed fully and healthily, the Yiwu and Changde cases.
Yiwu
The CWRM in Yiwu was started in 1991, when a group of Japanese lawyers/activists approached the victims.Footnote 40 Some villagers were encouraged to collect evidence by interviewing victims and their descendants.Footnote 41 Yet, the work was intermittent and did not develop well until 1995, when Wang Xuan 王选, a Japan-educated Yiwu native, speaking both Japanese and the local dialect, joined the investigation. After she had collected oral historical evidence for two years, the victims, activists and lawyers filed lawsuits and established an SMO in 1997. A former town official co-led the organization with Wang Xuan. All our informants agreed that Wang Xuan's involvement was the critical moment for Yiwu, and even the whole CWRM. Wang insisted on the independence of victims and sometimes had squabbles with the Japanese lawyers, who tried to control the agenda to serve their own political causes.Footnote 42 Her strong stance, with the members' ability to raise funds, enabled the grassroots SMO to grow in a relatively independent manner.
The local government took an attitude of absenteeism, which was the result of long-term interactions instead of a prescribed, formal strategy. The Yiwu SMO rarely attempted to urge the state to change its foreign policy about the war reparations, and hence the central government did not press the county government to stop them. Some informants attributed this absenteeism to the role of the SMO leaders, who are former officials and trusted by the local government as “reliable people.” One of the leading members of the CWRM in Yiwu had been a long-standing Party secretary of a township, a fairly high position in the local context. This political veteran understood the art of communicating with government officials: he regularly reported their activities to the county officials and sometimes invited them to meetings.Footnote 43 The officials came to the activities a few times and then did not bother to attend, even when invited.
The central and local governments' absenteeism left considerable room for the movement to grow and flourish, which was only possible, however, when the civil society had a strong base for the movement. Since the 1990s, Yiwu has transformed from a small county town to one of the richest small-scale cities in China; this stunning development took only ten years. The affluence of Yiwu activists and local civil society sustained the movement financially. The largest expense for CWRM participants, especially the victims, was trips to Japan, each of which costs about 10,000 yuan per person. This fairly large amount usually frustrated victims elsewhere. Yet the Yiwu plaintiffs managed to find support, mainly from their children and other private sources.Footnote 44
Another equally important civil society factor was the local community on which the major sector is based. Many plaintiffs are physically located in a once plague-stricken village called Congshan 崇山, where the residents share the surname Wang and are related to each other. The horrible stories about the bubonic plague were transmitted through an oral tradition and articulated to the outside public by the movement. Thus, members of this memory community enthusiastically participated in the movement. They chipped in to build a small memorial in the village.Footnote 45 Most staff members of the SMO in Yiwu are from Congshan.
Changde
The second case that developed fully and healthily, in Changde, was initiated by a group of Japanese lawyers led by Wang Xuan in 1996, when they went to Changde to investigate the bacterial warfare history. The vice-director of the city Foreign Affairs Office received them, and joined the activism with the city government's permission.Footnote 46 Local officials/historians in marginal bureaus, such as the Local History Office, provided existing data. The volunteer activists took an active role in collecting more evidence from previously unknown victims. Their SMO consisted of more than 100 regular participants, mainly government officials, college teachers, volunteers from towns and villages, and victims or descendents of victims.Footnote 47 They are proud of their efficient data collection: 7,643 victims' data were systematically collected, classified and eventually confirmed by the Japanese courts. The SMO in Changde was well organized but had some financial difficulties. Some ad hoc small funds were provided by the local government to cover copying and telephone expenses, but they were intermittent and made available only when the SMO officials applied.Footnote 48
Changde's case can be characterized by the co-operation between the local government and the movement. The city government permitted officials or former officials to be movement organizers; meanwhile, they also encouraged victims and activists to participate. Nevertheless, their intention to co-operate with the civil society was more complicated than assumed. On one hand, the SMO officials apparently acquired permission from the central government. At an early stage, when a local Foreign Affairs official desired to join the movement, she called the central Foreign Affairs Department and got a lukewarm “yes” reply.Footnote 49 Several major figures in the SMO are former high-ranking officials, who still hold important positions in a state-sponsored local college. However, as two of my informants (one former vice-mayor, one professor of the Bacterial Warfare Research Institute in the local college) admitted, the city government got involved because it intended to use the movement as a vehicle to enhance the reputation of the city, which otherwise is hardly known outside Hunan province. One of them used a distinctive word in Chinese political vocabulary to describe this intention: CWRM for Changde is a “business card.”Footnote 50
The local government's involvement provided the movement sector with a favourable political opportunity structure by consolidating the alliance between the civil society and the government. Thus the movement was able to use some governmental resources. Moreover, the officials' explicit support sent an assuring signal that encouraged more participants. One key member of the SMO was a local beer factory owner, who regularly donated money to the SMO and paid for the dinner parties that officials and key activists attended.Footnote 51 The less wealthy participants contributed to the movement by conducting interviews village by village in the rural areas in Changde. Nevertheless it would be oversimplistic to describe the alliance as seamless. During his stay in Changde, the first author heard the ordinary participants' complaints about the local college research centre for their using the evidence the participants had collected without giving them credit.Footnote 52 Yet, overall this co-operation did enable the movement to use resources and recruit participants from both the local government and the civil society.
The forced labourers and the chemical weapon cases: takeover
The cases of the forced labourers and chemical weapon victims, which were sometimes supported strongly and explicitly by the central government and sometimes by local governments, were mired in their poor development. The state's role in both cases can be characterized as “takeover,” but the methods differed. In the forced labourers case, the central government bypassed the local governments, working through the state-sponsored All-China Lawyers' Association and the Red Cross to co-operate with Japanese lawyers.Footnote 53 In the chemical weapons case, the central state worked through the local government and took over the movement at an earlier stage. Nevertheless, in both, the state's involvement impeded the movement by discouraging participation from civil society and allowing political and economic interests to meddle with the movements.
This pattern was especially salient in the Hanaoka lawsuit.Footnote 54 The victims demanded compensation in the early 1990s but did not file lawsuits until 1995, when they were approached by a group of Japanese lawyers who had strong political connections with the Japanese Social Democratic Party. Since then, the case has been controlled by two groups of people: left-wing Japanese lawyers and Chinese lawyers with a strong governmental background.Footnote 55 Most of the Japanese lawyers were affiliated with a left-wing organization, the Japan–China Friendship Association, which had a strong connection to the Chinese Communist Party.Footnote 56 Both groups wanted to use Hanaoka to demonstrate their achievements in memory politics. The accused construction company, Kajima, also wanted to provide some money to solve the problem once and for all. All these factors eventually led to an “amicable agreement” by which Kajima neither admitted the facts nor made an apology to the victims. The lawyers, on behalf of the victims but without telling them details, signed the agreement, and the state-backed China Red Cross distributed the money to the victims. The official Chinese media described the agreement as “compensations and apology,” and the Chinese Foreign Affairs Department soon announced that Kajima “has admitted the historical facts and expressed deep remorse to the victims and their families.”Footnote 57 However, several descendants of forced labourers living in Japan discovered the rhetorical tricks; some victims protested against the agreement and criticized the Japanese lawyers. A huge debate was provoked, with most of the CWRM's leading figures on the victims' side.Footnote 58 But some victims accepted the money without complaints. The distribution work ended two years later without explanation.
The chemical weapon cases were filed by a number of victims before the “8/4 incident.”Footnote 59 After the 8/4 incident, the government immediately took over the case and negotiated with Japan, with whom China co-signed the Chemical Weapon Convention. Following an investigation and diplomatic bargaining, a certain amount of “console money” was paid by the Japanese state, but no lawsuit was filed. The money was paid directly to a state-owned hospital to treat victims. Some victims and activists, however, complained that the hospital deliberately raised its fees to an abnormal level to make extra profits.Footnote 60 After the fund was exhausted, the Chinese state decided to withdraw because the political goal had been achieved via the console fund. Although the state continued to publicize the case and made it a high-profile one, it did not plan to file a lawsuit for victims who still suffered from the disease and were unable to work. Some Japanese and Chinese lawyers helped the victims sue the Japanese government, but their mobilization was restricted. One of the lawyers sometimes had to use her own money to finance the case, but she became less involved after she was diagnosed with heart disease.Footnote 61 No SMO was founded, and all the cases were rejected because the Japanese court claimed the agreement between the two states had already settled the issue.
In sum, the two cases backed by the central government developed poorly. Without the victims' own SMO and strong activists, the state's intervention facilitated the political manoeuvring of the Chinese state and the Japanese leftists in the Hanaoka case, and of both Chinese and Japanese states in the chemical weapon case. As a result, the government's strong support discouraged participation from civil society and finally led to the cases' ill-development.
The Chongqing bombing case: suppression
The Chongqing sector could have been influential. As a result of the Japanese Imperial Army's long-term indiscriminate air raids during the war, the victims were numerous. Chongqing residents enthusiastically supported the litigation and investigation. At an early stage, there were more than 30 regular members of the SMO. Although the issue was publicized in 2001, no lawsuit was filed until 2006. The SMO suffered from constant internal conflicts, which finally led to organizational paralysis and grave financial problems.Footnote 62 Why did this SMO with a considerable number of participants not succeed?
After analysing different parties in the sector, we conclude that the poor development was the result of problems in the interactions between the state and the movement, which finally led the local government to change its attitude from exploitation to suppression. The conflicts between the movement and the local government had existed from the movement's inception. The case was started by a former journalist, who had established an exhibition of the history of the bombing, as well as an informal organization for the victims.Footnote 63 Noticing the case's ideological value, the city government soon joined the movement. When a Japanese lawyer approached the victims, the municipal government of Chongqing did not allow the former journalist to meet him. Instead, the History Archives (Wenshi Guan 文史馆) arranged his itinerary.Footnote 64 The journalist was finally forced to leave the organization. Yet, some activists' resistance checked the municipal government's desire to exploit and infiltrate the movement. They argued that a new participant, endorsed by the government, faked evidence to claim that he was a “victim” and tried to seize power over the organization. One of the major activists/victims, G, faithfully wrote letters to the central government, urging the relevant bureaus to change their foreign policies towards Japan.Footnote 65 The central government was apparently annoyed and ordered the local government to trim the movement. Under pressure, the local government went even further: all Chongqing government-owned media were ordered not to report on the bombing reparations issue for a year or so. A lawyer working for the organization revealed another reason for this severe controlFootnote 66: several senior victims in the organization and some anti-Japanese veterans wrote a petition to the city government to return the name of a prominent memorial slate located in a main shopping area from the Slate of Liberation of Chongqing People (Chongqing renmin jiefang jinian bei 重庆人民解放纪念碑), to the Slate of Anti-Japanese War Victory (Kangzhan shengli jigong bei 抗战胜利纪功碑), an old name used by the Nationalist Party, which had designated Chongqing as its wartime capital. These interactions among the local government, the central government and the victims finally led to destructive outcomes: G and some other previous core members had to leave the organization; and the movement suffered from a lack of financial support and internal conflicts.
The “comfort women” case and the Nanjing Massacre: control and takeover
Cases do not always neatly match ideal types. The case of the “comfort women”Footnote 67 is a combination of “takeover” and “control” instead of a single interaction pattern. This is because of the division within the sector: lawyers from the All-China Lawyers' Associations were in charge of litigation, while historians in Shanghai focused on collecting oral histories. In the litigation part, the state–society interaction followed the same “takeover” pattern as in the forced labourers case.Footnote 68 Thus the litigation did not turn into an influential movement. In the oral history part, a historian in Shanghai, his colleagues and students have been undertaking the oral history project for almost a decade. However, his social position as a history professor in a state-owned university brought him hassles and surveillance. In July 2007, Yiwu's SMO and his research centre co-sponsored a bacterial warfare reparations conference, which the first author attended. Yet the university made a last-minute call to the historian, asking him to change the meeting venue to somewhere off-campus, because the university “didn't want to have trouble.” Other controls are soft, such as subsidizing the research centre but making sure the professor's agenda will not deviate from the official one. The effects of the “control” approach were similar to those of takeover and suppression, but slightly better. The small group of historians and volunteers continued to function, but probably more in the form of scholarly research than as a social movement.
The Nanjing Massacre is a “negative case” in which there was no reparations movement. In contrast to the Massacre's publicity and large number of victims, the absence of a reparations movement is conspicuous. The reason for this is similar to the reason for the chemical weapon case: the high degree of governmental involvement excluded the possibility of civil society participation. A large-scale official memorial was set up as early as the mid-1980s.Footnote 69 The memorial and its affiliated institutions monopolized the available commemorative resources for the issue. Consequently, no movement was launched.
Conclusion
In sum, our research on the CWRM has proposed and illustrated a “dynamic statism” that emphasizes variations and dynamics of the state–society relationship at different levels and in various contexts. These variations, we argue, were caused by the Chinese state's ambivalent attitude towards this ideologically useful yet institutionally troublesome movement. Thus local governments had considerable leeway to choose the most convenient or advantageous strategies. We demonstrate that both strong repression and facilitation discouraged participation in the movement. Official war memories are translated into collective political actions only in the contexts where the movement is relatively independent of or has a co-operative relationship with the government. In both cases, local communities and informal networks play a significant role in mobilizing resources.
The findings of this study can enrich our understanding of memory politics and nationalism in contemporary China. Without denying the state's hegemonic use of war memory, this study provides a nuanced and dynamic picture of state–society interactions, which generate variations of memory politics at the local level. It also contributes to our knowledge about Chinese politics and social movements in general. The recent decades have witnessed a rise of new social movements, whose ideological claims are useful for the state but whose collective actions pose a potential threat to “political stability,” the state's top concern. Another prominent example is the environmental movement, which demonstrates similar ambivalence and interaction patterns between local governments and the movement.Footnote 70 As Chinese society becomes increasingly diverse, we expect that more social movements with non-oppositional claims will arise. We hope the mechanisms theorized in this article provide a base for future research.
