The “history problem” in East Asia has already generated a vast amount of literature. Nevertheless, quality English sources on the domestic side of postwar memory making are still scarce. This applies to Japan, but even more so to Korea and China. In the latter case, only a few authoritative studies exist on the 1945–1982 period, and those that do exist were written mostly by foreign scholars. This book, by a Chinese author, is therefore a welcome addition. It is even more welcome for the open challenge it issues to the current scholarship. Yang Chan argues that Chinese war remembrance has been portrayed as too monolithic and government-centric. In Yang's view, the central authorities were never fully in control of the national memory landscape. She tells us that regional memories as well as civil society actors have had a considerable impact on how China has reminisced about the past. Furthermore, Yang strongly opposes the notion that the Chinese state tried to curb public awareness of the Japanese atrocities before the 1980s in order to buttress its relationship with Japan. And the CCP was apparently not as anti-Kuomintang as often thought either. For example, we learn that certain KMT war heroes were included in the mainland's official commemoration. Overall, then, the book implies that there was a much greater continuity in the Chinese remembrance before and after the 1980s than is believed today.

In general, I find these arguments reasonable. I agree, for instance, with the author's contention that too much attention has been paid to the top level of the Chinese state and bureaucracy. The interplay of the horizontal (center vs. periphery) and the vertical (state vs. public) dimensions of public memory-making certainly warrants more attention. I also agree with the implied thesis that the anger over the Japanese school textbooks or the Yasukuni shrine visits in the 1980s reflect long-held sentiments in China and not just a change in Beijing's policy. Last but not least, I applaud the author for analyzing a wide range of previously unconsulted primary sources. Still, despite these positive features, I cannot endorse this work.

To start with, I find the author's use of her sources problematic. It is not unusual to find only a couple of newspaper articles in support of inferences about entire decades or even the entire 1945–1982 period. Getting a clear sense of the timing and significance of the presented data is a challenge, too. This is mainly due to Yang's jumping between various eras in her exposition. The author can be describing the 1950s in one sentence and the 1960s or 1970s in the next. Given how drastically different the postwar decades in China were, this is troubling. Her geographical discussion suffers from similar problems. She mixes city, provincial, and national references in one narrative without making clear distinctions. In this regard, I was particularly struck by how freely she assumes that her findings from Nanjing (where she worked in local archives) are representative of all localities across China. Obviously, the city was not just another provincial town. It was the former capital and the site of one of the worst military rampages of World War II. The ransacking of Nanjing shocked even the Japanese, who adopted counter-measures to prevent similar incidents from occurring. The fact that we do not speak of the “Xuzhou Massacre,” “Guangzhou Massacre” or “Wuhan Massacre” (other large cities that fell after Nanjing) testifies to the special place that Nanjing holds in the Sino-Japanese conflict. The author's failure to address this issue raises concerns about the extent to which she overgeneralizes by simple extrapolation from Nanjing onto all of China.

In addition, the organization of the book and the style in which it is written calls for comment. While I do not believe that reviews of social scientific literature need to harp on language issues (I am myself a non-native English speaker), here an exception is warranted. Many times I found the writing difficult to follow, and I had to re-read sentences to properly understand the text. This served as a great distraction from the book's real arguments. The effort to cram every little detail from archival work into the text was also an unlucky choice. It filled the chapters with inconsequential data that further obfuscated its larger messages. The repeated prefaces outlining what would be said in each chapter, subsection, or subchapter were also distracting. In short, the book should have been much more rigorously edited before it was published.

This problem is also related to frequent inconsistencies in the author's arguments. For example, the following quotations are all from page 157:

Here, in the span of a few sentences, we learn that the non-state actors were not influenced, somewhat influenced, or critically influenced by the state. It is difficult to make sense of such writing. Ultimately, it is up to the reader to interpret the data presented in this book, and therein lies my biggest criticism. Throughout the work, Yang tries to make the case that Beijing had to accommodate to pressures from below, had to pay attention to regional experiences, and had to account for private memories. Yet throughout the book we also find ample evidence of the dominance of Chinese authorities over all other memory agents. In fact, Yang's materials demonstrate that the CCP was able to manipulate critical aspects of Chinese public remembrance anytime the party deemed it necessary. And if this reading of the evidence is correct, then the ultimate message of this book comes very close to what the existing literature has been saying all along.