Research project
Global China’s New Heroes: Martyrs and Memory Laws in Xi Jinping’s China
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
Moving forward current decentring agendas across the disciplines of international relations, political science and law and advancing the emerging scholarship on ‘Global China’, the project utilises in-depth history and area studies expertise to elucidate and interrogate two related innovations in China’s mnemonic governance. The first innovation draws on an understanding of historical memory as a powerful resource for building national cohesion and popular support in times of tensions. It entails a government-wide strategy to recast and refit the nation’s heroes and martyrs through expansion of the discursive ‘Self’, globalisation of national history, and virtualisation of remembrance practices. The second innovation reflects an understanding of historical memory as a potential threat that the party-state seeks to secure by juridifying ‘correct’ memory and criminalising ‘historical nihilist’ counter-memory. This entails the promulgation and application of a system of new memory laws with wide-ranging domestic implications and extraterritorial reach.
This project brings together a diverse, cross-disciplinary group of emerging and established scholars based within and beyond the LIAS to explore these two mnemonic innovations – one creative and one coercive – and their far-reaching implications. We are expounding the construction, co-optation and contestation of memorials, legislation and policies, and related official and public discourses from political, sociological, legal and diplomatic perspectives with a view to creatively linking and advancing current research agendas in memory studies, comparative law studies, religious studies and emerging work on Global China. In so doing, the project promises to shed new light on who China’s 21st-century heroes and martyrs are, how their legacies are mediated, adapted and contested, and what this means for a globalising China in the evolving world order.