Representations of "Manchuria" in Northeast China

The aim of this paper is to outline the way in which Chinese people in northeast People's Republic of China have remembered, & today portray, the reality of their past experience during the war & their time under Japanese colonial rule. The following argument is based on a survey conducted at 21 facilities aimed at commemorating the colonial era. I conducted close observations & interviews at these facilities. I chronologically & analytically categorize these facilities into three types as follows. First, from the end of the l940s to the mid-1960s, many monuments, such as memorial tombs commemorating heroes of the war, were constructed. To the Chinese they represented new values & were symbols of unity, & freedom from the colonial order. The objects commemorated in this stage represent "individual death." Next, from the mid-1960s to the 1970s, the places where massacres had taken place & forced laborers' corpses had been left were memorialized. This made the victims of colonial rule visible. To put it simply, these commemorate "collective death." Since the l980s, many museums focused on "Manchuria" have been founded. Their similarity does not lie in what they display, but how they are displayed: Fragmentary stories have been merged into a story of the nation as a whole. Here, a "collective life" that retrieves historical process is commemorated. The changes seen in commemoration forms over this long period of time show the development of our cognitive means of relating to the reality of the past. That is, there has been a development from personal contact with the past by way of martyrs & victims in national events, to impersonal contact by way of the reorganization of the historical story itself. I see these commemorations as corresponding to the development of the museum system, which is a phenotype of modern knowledge. 1 Reference. Adapted from the source document.