Life Histories and National Narratives: Remembering Occupied Manchuria in Postwar China

Recent studies of memory work in China have explored productively the uses of national narratives of war and victimhood, at times supported by personal testimony, in service of a ‘public transcript’ of Party-state legitimacy. However, oral histories of education in Japanese-occupied north-east China, collected by Chinese researchers and published in 2005, hint at more complex relations between story, storyteller and imagined audience. Without challenging established judgements on the occupation itself, these personal histories articulate more nuanced and ambivalent social histories of wartime schooling, suggesting that former students were neither passive victims of occupation nor passive consumers of state-sponsored historical narrative.