Research project
Advancing Authoritarian Memory: Global China’s New Heroes
Rising geopolitical tensions are causing states and national elites to innovate their use of the past for present-day political ends. This is certainly true for the People’s Republic of China, which prepares to celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2024 amid mounting superpower rivalry, ideological tensions with the West, and persistent domestic challenges. This project investigates the ambitious and far-reaching campaign initiated recently by the Chinese party-state to refashion and repurpose the country’s pantheon of national heroes and martyrs for the aim of uniting and mobilising the nation during what it perceives to be the critical final phase in its long-running quest to achieve ‘national rejuvenation’ and become a modern global superpower.
- Duration
- 2024 - 2027
- Contact
- Vincent Chang
Chinese memory politics are typically overlooked or treated as anomalous in the field of Memory Studies and the social sciences disciplines informing this multidisciplinary scholarly domain. Emerging scholarship on Global China, meanwhile, has thus far focused on China’s economic globalization and paid less attention to the normative and ideational aspects. This project uses the Chinese ‘case’ of martyrdom reconstruction to illuminate the increasingly transnational nature and impact of China’s emerging historical, legal and digital statecraft, whilst anchoring it in related genres of Memory Studies, connecting it with emergent work on illiberalism and authoritarian governance across the international relations, law and political science disciplines that inform this field, and thereby moving forward current ‘decentring agendas’ across these disciplines.
The veneration of martyrs is a recurring theme in Chinese history. Linking personal grief with public morality, martyrdom is at the intersection where state–society relations are continually negotiated and renewed. It thus provides an ideal vantage point for studying the state’s evolving moral governance and societal responses to these endeavours. Yet despite this apparent significance, the literature on martyrdom and heroism in modern China remains sparse and fragmented, and studies related to martyrdom that bridge the gap between past and present are wanting. Moreover, despite its far-reaching domestic and global effects, Beijing’s unprecedented current push to revive martyrdom has received little attention in international scholarship. This project is an attempt to fill this gap, both as an important empirical contribution in itself and as a means to enrich, advance and ‘globalize’ the dynamic field of Memory Studies.