New York: Cornell University Press, 2021. xv, 272 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$67.95, cloth. ISBN 9781501756504.
Military martyrdom occupies a central place in the “commemoration-turn” in China studies. The subject is a complex tapestry that weaves together memorial, heroism, sacrifice, violence, and bereavement in a depiction of noble politics, conflicting ideologies, and harrowing images of violent death. Linh D. Vu’s excellent book Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China is a welcome addition to this burgeoning new field of scholarship. Vu offers a compelling and nuanced analysis of the development of commemoration culture and the politicization of martyrdom by the Kuomintang in its drive to build a modern nation-state. She painstakingly chronicles the setting up of an institutional infrastructure (including compensation committees) by the Nanjing regime to regulate the war dead, thereby extending the party’s control over the living.
In fascinating detail, Vu shows how the Nationalist (Kuomintang) regime in Nanjing, led by Chiang Kai-shek, actively articulated the notion of heroic death to consolidate its control, forge national unity, and establish a strong state during the tumultuous Republican period (1912–1949). The Nationalists accomplished these goals through a variety of carefully planned techniques: building martyrs’ shrines, performing annual sacrifices, announcing laws that compensated the bereaved, and compiling hagiographic biographies of fallen soldiers. By venerating the war dead as “necrocitizenry”—defined by the author as “the population of the deceased who are acknowledged by the state and who are posthumously incorporated into the nation” (7)—the Nanjing regime enshrined millions of fallen soldiers as loyal citizens who gave their lives to save China.
The book includes five thematic chapters arranged in chronological order. In chapter 1, Vu highlights the symbolic importance of the Yellow Flower Hill martyrs, a group of young rebels who died in a daring but abortive attempt to overthrow the Qing dynasty in April 1911 in the southern city of Guangzhou. This momentous military revolt presaged the eventual success of the Wuchang Uprising six months later, which laid the foundation for the commemoration culture of the Republican era.
In chapter 2, Vu examines the setting up of compensation committees and regulations by the Kuomintang to compensate families of dead soldiers. The officials also ordered the construction of memorials, shrines, and cemeteries for these war dead to instill shared political goals. These projects helped Chiang Kai-shek, an advocate of the supremacy of the armed forces for building a strong nation, to cement his power in the party.
Vu is at her best in chapter 3 where her meticulous archival sleuthing demonstrates the political connection between the state and the bereaved. Using government funds such as annual stipends and tuition waivers, the Kuomintang cultivated allegiance from the living in a process of what Vu calls “the politics of compensation” (115).
Vu discusses women’s roles in the construction of the national commemoration narrative in chapter 4, another strong chapter. She is at pains to document Nationalist plans to incorporate women, especially widows, into the state’s narrative of martyrdom by portraying them as virtuous wives and devoted mothers, linking the family to the nation. Although some women became martyrs themselves, Vu opines that the state continued to associate their deaths with upholding feminine virtues, thus reinforcing traditional gender norms.
The final chapter shows how the concept of necrocitizenship was extended by the government to include virtually all civilians who died during the War of Resistance against Japan and the following civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. Civilians, as loyal citizens, were asked to support the armed forces in fighting against foreign and domestic enemies, which resulted in the militarization of Chinese society during the Republican era.
Vu’s close reading of the compensation petition letters submitted by the bereaved is illuminating. Though couched in official formulaic language, these letters went far beyond expressing citizens’ devotion and loyalty to the state. They often revealed the hardships of everyday life for the mourning families: we see lonely widows and orphans making plaintive pleas for support, pouring out their hearts and pleading for understanding. These forgotten voices, long marginalized in discussions of high politics, are brought to light by the author, providing a glimpse into ordinary people’s lives—lives often quite different from those found in the official panegyrics.
The author occasionally indulges in jargon, overloading her arguments with postmodern concepts, many of which are ordinary concepts that are needlessly presented in an abstruse fashion. For example, clumsy neologisms—“necrobureaucracy,” “necroconstituency,” “necronominalism”—borrowed from Russ Castronovo, Thomas Laqueur, and others, at times make for difficult and dreary reading.
There are also questions that the book leaves unanswered. For instance, although Vu discusses in considerable length the Kuomintang’s idolizing of those who died at the hands of the Communists, whom the Kuomintang dubbed “red bandits” (141), she neglects to discuss the Communist response to the Kuomintang. The meaning of necrocitizenry in Republican China cannot be fully grasped without some degree of comparison between the views of the rival parties toward martyrdom. This issue becomes particularly contentious when discussing the civil war. A case in point is how the Kuomintang general Zhang Lingfu, who was killed by Red Army soldiers in the Menglianggu Campaign in May 1947 in Shandong Province, was viewed. Zhang was immediately eulogized by the Nationalists as a heroic martyr, yet he was denounced by his opponent, the Red Army commander Wang Bicheng, as a villain whose hands were stained with the people’s blood.
While Vu argues that “the exaltation of the use of force and the glorification of violence” (187), especially during the War of Resistance, lies at the core of China’s war remembrance in the Republican period, she overlooks that this was just one aspect of memorial politics. Paying homage to the fallen is a complex ritual that involves more than exalting heroism and self-sacrifice. It also paradoxically points to the destructiveness of war: the carnage, the dismemberings, the constant dehumanizing fear, and the unending pain—in amply evident in the grieving petition letters. Paul Fussell, who fought and was wounded in World War II and whose work Vu quotes, warned against romanticizing and sanitizing military violence. The hellish trauma of mass death on the battlefield, Fussell maintained, easily upends the long-held notions of sacrifice, duty, and serving for a higher cause. In reality, the noble words—“honor,” “valor,” “patriotism”—often ring hollow for the bereaved.
These are, however, minor flaws in what is altogether a well-researched and absorbing study of war commemoration in Republican China.
Chang-tai Hung
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong