Remembering China’s Last Year

On October 23, 2020, Chinese President Xí Jinping held a state ceremony to commemorate the 70th anniversary of China’s entrance to the Korean War. In the same month, three documentary film series were aired on CCTV, a war movie (featuring action star Wu Jing) opened in theaters across the country, and China also reopened two national Korean War memorials after years of renovation. The flurry of remembrances across films, museums, and political spectacles leave one wondering why the war has had such a hold on Chinese historical imagination? How has the memory of war shifted from the communist era to the post-socialist present? How does China remember its “last war” in the shadow of a new US-China cold war?

This event is organized by Xuefei Hao, Academic Specialist of the MSU Chinese Program. This talk is sponsored by the MSU Asian Studies Center and is a part of the Center’s Global Virtual Speakers Program (GVSP).

Speaker: Zhao Ma is an Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History and Culture and Director of Undergraduate Studies. He received his Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University in 2007 and joined the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Washington University in 2011. He is currently writing a new book, Seditious Voices in Revolutionary China, 1950-1953. It examines the relationship between rumor-mongering and political propaganda during China’s Korean War campaign and offers a lens through which to study the transformation of urban informational space against the backdrop of war fever and emerging revolutionary politics in Mao’s China.

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