That Which Is Carved in Stone: Nanjing’s Monuments and Chinese Commemoration of the Second World War

Mourning (1937–1945)

The Japanese assault on the Chinese capital of Nanjing in the winter of 1937 was a catastrophe for the city and its people, ushering in what one observer described as a “reign of robbery, rapine and killing” by Japanese troops (Brook, 2010: 15). The records, letters, diaries, and memoirs of Western observers who remained in the city as part of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone (NSZ), which was modeled on the Jacquinot Safety Zone pioneered in Shanghai earlier that year, provide an important window into these events.

One memorandum in particular stands out. Written on January 25, 1938, it is simply addressed “To whom it may concern, in the name of humanity!” and provides an account of conditions—the “daily outrages”—at Nanjing’s Qixia Temple during the preceding month. According to a brief introduction, the letter was signed by one of Qixia’s senior monks along with twenty local notables, and was delivered to the NSZ by Bernard Arp Sindberg, a Danish employee of the nearby Kiangnan Cement Works. Describing the rape, murder, and looting by Japanese troops, the memorandum’s authors plead for humanitarian help. This letter provides important evidence of how the monks of Qixia, like the Western expatriate community in the NSZ, cared for some 20,400 Chinese civilians during the invasion by housing them in makeshift shelters on the temple grounds (see Figure 1), and also conveys the monks’ fear of continued “inhuman atrocities” (Brook, 2010: 135).

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Figure 1.

“Refugee huts at Tse Hsia Shan, outside Nanking. March 1938” (Special Collections, Divinity Library, Yale University, Ernest & Clarissa Forster Papers).

In the wake of this devastation, the Chinese authorities that administered Nanjing immediately after the invasion left little by way of commemoration. Certainly, the sentiments expressed in the memorandum, with its outrage over the atrocity, could not be safely expressed in public. Restoring order in the city was stymied by Japanese troops, whose mere presence at best deterred people from leaving the safety zones, and at worst terrorized them, as when Japanese soldiers gunned down workers from the city’s electrical plant who remained in Nanjing to ensure the power supply (Hu, 2006: 182). Instead, the urge to mourn and commemorate the dead could only be expressed in neutral terms, inflected by Buddhism, with no denunciation of Japanese atrocity.

As early as December 1937, Nanjing’s Red Swastika Society, which played a key role in burying the dead, erected a small Stele of Lost Souls grave marker in Xiaguan, an impoverished district badly damaged during the invasion. The marker, no longer extant, merely noted that the site was a mass grave (Sun, 2013: 8). Amid ongoing violence, further explanation was both superfluous and dangerous. The stele was installed as a symbol of mourning, which stood in contrast to the narrative framework of “heroic resistance” in Free China, which, as Parks Coble has noted, avoided excessive attention to Japanese atrocity and the Chinese suffering it implied (Coble, 2011: 390).

The Nanjing Self-Government Committee, which held its inauguration ceremony on January 1, 1938, at the Drum Tower Hospital amid still-smoldering buildings, initially was more concerned with burying the dead than commemorating them (Rabe, 1999: 109). It was only some months later, with the inauguration of the Reformed Government, another Nanjing-based occupation state established under Japanese auspices, that the city saw a more formal act of commemoration, one that may have been made easier by the fact that the Japanese were also beginning to commemorate the war dead—both Japanese and Chinese—through a series of monuments to be built in Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou (Japan Times & Mail, 1939a).

On May 28, 1939, the “superintendent” 督辦 of Nanjing, a collaborationist official named Gao Guanwu 高冠吾, appropriated the language of the Red Swastika Society when he consecrated a prominent Stele of Lost Souls near Linggu Temple. Gao’s much larger memorial stood about ten feet tall and included plainly rendered Buddhist iconography. The stele’s text detailed the process of gathering up the remains of some three thousand dead, male and female, young and old, military and civilian, for burial in a mass grave “far from fox and hare”—a phrase sometimes associated with treacherous military officials that might have represented a subtle jab at Nationalist officers like Tang Shengzhi 唐生智, whose botched retreat from Nanjing exacerbated the plight of its citizens (Tan, 2012: 187). Gao referred obliquely to the deaths as taking place during the “Nanjing Incident,” but the details of the text, with its references to offerings of meat and drink to the dead, remained focused on mourning, with no reference to the Japanese. Instead, Gao lamented the fate of the dead, left to rot in the streets, with their souls condemned to wander without rest (Zhang and Lü, 2014: 218). Although the stele included Gao’s name and his position as Nanjing’s superintendent, the description was politically neutral. Instead, its Buddhist etchings reflected the sentiments of Nanjing’s refugees who described protective figures like John Rabe, who led the NSZ, and Minnie Vautrin, acting president of Ginling College, as having the “heart of the Buddha” 佛心 or outright being “living Bodhisattvas” 活菩薩 / 活觀音 (Hu and Zhang, 2010: 69, 156; Rabe, 1999: 168).

Less than a year later, the regime Gao served was shuffled off the stage to make way for yet another new government in Nanjing, this time under the leadership of Nationalist Party renegade Wang Jingwei 汪精衛, who led an assortment of politicians and intellectuals as part of the Reorganized National Government (RNG). Gao, who remained in office through the transition, was soon replaced and by 1941, with his memorial showing signs of disrepair, a concerned citizen wrote to Gao’s successor in the mayor’s office. “After the incident, former mayor Gao gathered up the remains of over three thousand abandoned corpses in and around the city and buried them in a mass grave east of Linggu Temple,” the anonymous writer reported. “This was truly a virtuous act! But the grave mound was not firmly built, and now part of it has collapsed. Your worship, you have never fallen short in doing good works. We should strive to restore [it]!” The new mayor, believing that the memorial contained the bodies of “fallen officers and men” and “heroes who died at their posts,” noted that the Japanese had built a memorial to their war dead elsewhere in the city, and directed the municipal Hygiene Bureau to rebuild it. When city workers arrived to investigate the site, however, they found that the settling of the remains in the ground beneath the memorial had caused the entire structure to collapse, and the project was put off due to budget constraints (Sun, 2005: 311–14). ¹

Despite such setbacks, the RNG did develop its own program of commemoration. From the center, the RNG recalled its own martyrs by instituting memorial days to commemorate those who died advocating peace (Shenbao nianjian she, 1944: 1514). At the local level, the organization of commemorations was caught up in the RNG’s support for Buddhism. In 1940, for example, the monks of Qixia Temple erected a memorial stele to commemorate Master Jiran, the otherwise unremarkable monk who led the effort to shelter refugees at Qixia during the Nanjing Massacre.

The Jiran stele consisted of two parts, each roughly a meter tall and a meter and a half long, and was originally placed in a prominent location just inside the main entranceway of the abbot’s residence at Qixia. Most of the stele’s text describes Jiran’s early circumstances, his conversion to Buddhism, his life as a monk, and his death on October 12, 1939. It is only toward the end of the stele that the text turns to Jiran’s wartime role, describing the refugee camp that Master Jiran and the other monks at Qixia operated during the Japanese attack. According to the stele, over twenty-four thousand civilians sheltered in the temple for four months, relying on the monks for food and protection (Long and Xu, 2009: 129).

The stele was authored by Ren Shan 仁山, another little-known monk who lived through the occupation. Ren’s language regarding the war is consistently neutral, mentioning only the “flames of war” and mourning the terrible sight of refugees crowding the streets, while praising the actions of Master Jiran (Ren, 1940: 7). In this sense, the text is less explicit than the memorandum penned two years earlier that found its way into the records of the NSZ, which blamed the Japanese for murder and rape. The stele’s calligraphy, however, was that of Chu Minyi 褚民誼, an acquaintance of Master Jiran who became the RNG’s foreign minister.

Chu’s interest in Buddhism and his connection to Jiran dated back at least to 1935, when he solicited funds from the upper echelon of the Nationalist Party and worked with Jiran to rebuild the Taixu Pavilion, a scenic spot on the grounds of Qixia Temple that had fallen into disrepair (Chu, 1935; Shishi xinbao, 1935). After the Japanese occupied Nanjing, Chu, who led the Sino-Japanese Cultural Association, then used Buddhism as a common basis in an attempt to build understanding with Japan (Chu, 1941: 14). For Chu and others, the Jiran stele was a way of showing respect for Jiran’s humanitarianism and burnishing their self-image as protectors of the people during the occupation.

Similarly, in 1941, the East Asian Buddhism Congress was convened in Nanjing, and the assembled delegates from both China and Japan, led by Chu, offered prayers for the wartime dead of both countries before making a brief visit to Pude Temple, significant mainly as the site of a mass grave containing 6,468 Chinese killed during the Nanjing Massacre. The language used in these instances remained for the most part politically neutral, couched in Buddhist terms of relieving the souls 超渡 of the war dead of both China and Japan (Zhongzhi zongjiao datong lianmeng, 1941: 15).

Apart from these examples, there are few other known instances of commemoration during the Japanese occupation. The challenge of mere survival during the war took priority over monuments and memorials to the dead, and the passage of time and various political campaigns since then have also taken their toll. The history of the monuments for which we have records—the marker put up by the Red Swastika Society, Gao Guanwu’s Stele of Lost Souls, and the Jiran stele at Qixia Temple—offer insight into Chinese humanitarian efforts to save lives and remember the dead during the Japanese attack on the city. This humanitarianism was also on display at other times under the RNG, as when Chu convened the East Asian Buddhism Congress in Nanjing in 1941.

More than that, however, these relics reveal that even under the Japanese occupation the impulse to publicly mourn the dead and commemorate the attack on the city could find expression among the survivors. In recounting these events, it was necessary to use a very particular narrative framework, one that avoided reference to Japan’s “inhuman atrocity,” as in the privately sent memorandum from the monks at Qixia Temple. Instead, commemoration during this period emphasized mourning, which fit comfortably within the RNG’s narrative of the war. That narrative rationalized collaboration with Japan by portraying the RNG as a humanitarian government concerned for the welfare of the people in occupied territory.

Triumph (1945–1949)

On August 15, 1945, the emperor of Japan announced his country’s surrender, bringing the Second World War to a close. Although China under the Nationalist Party was victorious, Japanese forces in China proper remained undefeated and at their posts. The Nationalist government in Chongqing found itself in an awkward position. Racing to reclaim Nanjing before the Communists could do so, it required the Japanese to remain in place. It also needed to take into account the role (and eventual disposition) of erstwhile RNG officials, who were still present and active in the capital, as a potential source of assistance or embarrassment (Pepper, 1999: 9–16).

The return of the Nationalists to Nanjing marked a historic if ambiguous moment. Hans van de Ven has pointed to the conciliatory tone of Jiang Jieshi’s August 15 broadcast, urging China to be guided in dealing with the Japanese by the Christian imperative to “repay evil with kindness.” This, van de Ven suggests, was part of an attempt to present the image of a benevolent victor, but it was not apparent how widely such benevolence would be extended, nor whether the war itself would be commemorated in such magnanimous terms (van de Ven, 2017: 205). Lieutenant Paul E. Hassett, an American airman aboard the second U.S. aircraft to touch down in the city, was struck by the day’s symbolism and recalled, rather less loftily, the horror of the Nanjing Massacre. “Now starts the revenge,” he predicted in a letter home on August 27, conscious as he wrote that among his passengers was a Chinese colonel who had led his men in flight from the fallen capital eight years earlier (Hassett, 1945: 1). And among the returning elites in Chongqing, there was a sense that the occupied territories, and the people in them, had been tainted by the Japanese occupation and needed to be rehabilitated, rather than repaid with kindness as Jiang preached. Some, like the prominent historian and acting-president of Peking University, Fu Sinian, even assumed that Nanjing’s students and teachers needed to be reeducated to ensure their loyalty and sense of Chinese identity (Wang, 2000: 177). Indeed, regardless of how much the people of Nanjing might have shared in celebrating the Japanese surrender, their wartime experiences were vastly different from those who had spent the war years in far-off Chongqing and were now intent on resuming their “rightful” place in the capital. These differences, as well as the lack of resources and the crisis of the civil war, meant that Nationalists’ attempt to enforce a unified narrative of their triumph in the war would end in failure.

For the returning Nationalists, the complexity and confusion in Nanjing posed a challenge to reestablishing their administration. They initially depended not only on Japanese troops and the RNG authorities for maintaining order (as well as American largesse in the form of C-47 transport planes); they were also uncertain about the allegiance of a population whose wartime experience they could scarcely comprehend.

The local response to the arrival of officials from Chongqing was initially muted. The evaluation of Zou Ruojun 鄒若軍, one of the first Chinese correspondents to arrive in the city after the fall of the RNG, was stark. Finding fault with the local people’s lack of excitement at his arrival and their lack of “national consciousness” 國家意識, he compared the city unfavorably with Shanghai and felt it had been “defiled” by eight years of occupation, concluding, “We must spiritually rebuild Nanjing.” Another report even suggested that the women of Nanjing had been “thoroughly Nipponized,” and that the first wave of troops to arrive from Chongqing were greeted with “stony stares, silence, and a complete absence of any demonstrations” (Zou, 1946; The Republic, 1945). The arrival of General He Yingqin 何應欽, commander-in-chief of the Chinese army, on September 8, only a day before the signing of the instrument of surrender, provoked a more effusive welcome (van de Ven, 2017: 209), but even then, street-level dynamics in the city remained complex.

Surveying the capital that same day, George Wang of the United Press saw a maze of competing jurisdictions: still-armed Japanese police, newly arrived Chongqing military police, and puppet officials standing on a single street corner, all attempting to direct the city’s traffic. Outwardly, he remarked, it was still difficult to determine who had actually won the war. Wang was not alone in his bafflement. Veteran China correspondent Tillman Durdin also registered his surprise from the bar of Nanjing’s International Club that a portrait of Sun Yat-sen could still be found in the city, seemingly oblivious to the fact that ties with Sun and Nationalist Party orthodoxy were central to Wang Jingwei’s claims to legitimacy and had been a key point of competition between the RNG and Chongqing (Wang, 1945; Durdin, 1945; Du, 2019: 203). And Frederick Mote, then a young interpreter with the U.S. Army, recalled the difficulty in ascertaining how the RNG was viewed. “[In] the population of Nanjing,” he recalled years later, “we found so many people with no apparent axe to grind who praised the puppet regime (while singling out certain of its officials who were hated) that determination of the truth [. . .] was virtually impossible” (Mote, 2010: 11). Under such circumstances, commemorating wartime triumph required selective forgetting for the people of Nanjing.

In Chongqing, Jiang Jieshi himself was mindful of the issue of commemoration. “We have wiped out the humiliations heaped on our nation during the past 100 years,” he noted in a triumphant speech, before telling an audience of foreign diplomats of his hope that the Chinese people would always remember events like the Nanjing Massacre lest they recur (Menon, 1972: 164). This mixed desire to both wipe away humiliation and remember the past was not necessarily conducive to historical consistency, but it did encapsulate the remembering and forgetting inherent to any commemoration and provide a window into the framework that the Nationalists would try to enforce. This began with the arrest of those who had been in power during the war years as Nationalist officials flocked back to Nanjing, in what Diana Lary described as more “a plague of locusts than a liberation,” but soon descended into the settling of scores. Even a senior staff officer in Chongqing’s army headquarters recalled how the seizure of puppet and enemy assets in the city descended into rampant carpet-bagging (Huang, 1987: 165; Lary, 2015: 46).

This realignment extended well beyond officialdom. Students and professors in the city were branded “bogus students” and “bogus professors” for having been part of “bogus universities” that had propagated “enslavement education.” Chan Cheong-Choo 陳昌祖, president of Nanjing’s National Central University at the end of the war, recalled being quickly relieved of first his car and chauffeur, and then his house and ultimately his freedom soon after Chongqing’s advance forces arrived in the city (Chan, 1978: 161). The prosecution of some of the leading members of the RNG that began in 1946 was marred by occasional public support for the accused, although that may have had as much to do with discontent with the postwar order as with any lingering loyalty to the RNG (Melby, 1946: 1; Musgrove, 2005: 17).

The troubled takeover of Nanjing and the rest of the occupied zone had immediate implications for postwar commemoration. Before Jiang Jieshi himself had even set foot in his recovered capital, Nationalist officials rushed to remake the city’s landscape so as to blot out reminders of the occupation regime. The subsequent demolition and construction projects of the returning government were an attempt to reassert control over the capital and over how the war would be commemorated.

Nanjing residents also played a part in this realignment, with its remembering and forgetting. The Nanjing Massacre Investigation Committee, established by the municipal government in November 1946, found itself stymied in part over the issue of forgetting. According to one account, over the course of the war, potential plaintiffs had died or left the city; their anger had weakened with time; they were unwilling to reopen old wounds; they were unable to identify who had perpetrated various crimes; or they felt that assisting in any investigation would bring no improvement to their harsh living conditions (Yang, 2012: 199). Whatever they may have felt, the Nanjing residents surveyed showed little willingness to contribute to the narrative the Nationalists were constructing.

The delicate position of the city’s Jinling Sutra Press, one of the leading publishers of Buddhist texts during the Republican period, provides insight into how ordinary residents navigated the takeover. The press, which had been damaged during the Japanese invasion, was able to continue operations during the war after the Sino-Japanese Cultural Association under Chu Minyi repaired the buildings. After the war, however, the stele that commemorated the repair project and mentioned Chu by name became politically inconvenient. Chen Fangke 陳方恪, a scholar at Southern University who was involved in the repairs, arranged for the stele to be covered over with lime lest its presence cause the entire compound to be identified as puppet property and therefore become subject to seizure (Pan and Pan, 2007: 147–49 and 156). As Chen understood, with Chu under arrest and Chongqing returnees riding roughshod over those who had remained in Nanjing, some aspects of the occupation were best forgotten.

Similarly, the Stele of Lost Souls erected by Gao Guanwu, which had evidently been rebuilt, became viewed as an insult to the deceased and evidence that Gao blamed the victims for their fate. “For every day it remains standing,” thundered Shanghai’s Shenbao, “and for every day the traitors go on living, it is another day in which the souls of the dead cannot rest!” ² By this time, Gao had already defected to the Communists and fled north, putting him beyond the reach of the collaborationist trials that would soon commence. His stele, on the other hand, was likely soon destroyed. ³

The next order of business was the destruction of Wang Jingwei’s temporary grave—a dome of reinforced concrete (see Figure 2) squatting on Plum Blossom Hill a short walk from the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, that had been selected until he could be permanently buried at Guangzhou’s Mt. Baiyun (Shenbao, 1944). As with much of the work regarding the retaking of Nanjing, this was directed by He Yingqin, who shrouded the operation with such secrecy that those carrying it out remained unaware of the objective until the destruction was already underway (Qiu, 2003: 176).

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Figure 2.

Chu Minyi (fifth from left) and others at the tomb of Wang Jingwei, undated (Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress).

First, Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum and the Ming tombs were closed to visitors for three days. Then, on the night of January 21, 1946, the mayor of Nanjing and local military commanders assembled at the gravesite at He’s behest to oversee its destruction. Ma Chongliu 馬崇六, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, ordered the grave blasted apart using 150 kilograms of TNT, taking care to muffle the sound of the explosion. Finally, Wang’s remains were placed aboard a truck for transport to a nearby crematorium, and the site was cleaned up to hide all trace of what once had been. In its place, a modest viewing pavilion was built in 1946, complete with a couplet marking the area as the burial spot of Three Kingdoms period warlord Sun Quan, specially composed lest visitors “mistakenly” assume that the structure was associated with Wang (Nanjing Municipal Archives, 1986: 791).

This furtive desecration reflected a range of anxieties. Wang’s tomb, situated so close to that of Sun Yat-sen, as well as Wang’s status as a renegade from Jiang Jieshi’s faction of the Nationalist Party, made the operation a matter of symbolically cleansing one of the party’s sacred sites. That the destruction was carried out at midnight, with elaborate steps to shield the operation from prying eyes, suggests that the returning Chongqing authorities were unsure of how the Nanjing public might react to the desecration. For the Chongqing returnees, the removal of the tomb smoothed over aspects of the occupation that were best left forgotten.

Instead, a new monument, reflecting the triumph of the returning Nationalists, was planned. Again, the assignment fell to Ma Chongliu and his engineering corps, who were tasked with building the monument. They turned to Wutaishan, a prominent hill near the city center that featured a Japanese-built Shinto shrine on its peak (see Figure 3). Rather than resorting to the wrecking ball, the Nationalists renovated the shrine for “another reading,” one that would, in the words of He Yingqin, enable “the military and the masses of the whole country, as well as people overseas, to understand clearly the full course of the war” (Shenbao, 1946). For this purpose, the shrine would be transformed from a space sacred to the invader into a monument to China’s triumph, adorned with broken relics of Japan’s defeat. The transformation was more symbolic than physical, however. Photographs of the newly reopened site show that most of the architectural features marking the site as a former Shinto Shrine remained intact, suggesting that replacing the shrine’s spirit tablets to Japanese deities with those for China’s fallen soldiers was the main point of transformation.

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Figure 3.

Shinto shrine at Wutaishan in Nanjing (Hedda Morrison Photographs of China Collection, Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University).

On May 29, 1946, He Yingqin presided first over a ceremony to comfort the souls of those who died in wartime service to China. He then conducted an opening ceremony, introducing the site to various VIPs before stepping aside to allow his daughter to cut the ribbon and declare the site open. Visitors entered the former shrine by passing through its distinctive paifang entranceway, now adorned with the Nationalist Party seal and Republic of China flag, before entering the first exhibition building, which documented the Japanese surrender. From there, they could make their way along paths lined with Japanese artillery shells to the remaining buildings with their displays of Japanese military equipment (Shanghai shi ri, 1946: 14).

Touching only briefly on the Nanjing Massacre, He’s remarks, as reported by the Nationalist Party’s Central Daily News, offer a window into the victorious narrative of resistance embedded in the government’s haphazard commemoration of the war. Initially, He admitted, the government planned to establish a martyr’s shrine at the site in order to commemorate the nation’s civilian and military war dead, but circumstances necessitated a change in plan. “This Shinto shrine,” He stated, “was used by the Japanese army to commemorate the Nanjing Massacre, as well as atrocities committed elsewhere, but army headquarters has decided to make use of it to commemorate China’s own fallen. Due to the complexity and number of tasks involved, however, even though the buildings have been renovated, the spirit tablets have yet to be installed” (Zhongyang ribao, 1946). Accordingly, army headquarters opted to use the site as a more modest Spoils of War Exhibition Hall.

Exhibition material included Japanese tanks, aircraft, and artillery and other weaponry, as well as documents and artifacts related to the war and surrender ceremony, plus several art pieces that had been looted by Japan and then returned to China following the surrender (Xia and Gao, 2009: 4086–87). Exhibiting these spoils of war before China’s fallen heroes and martyrs would, according to He, not only “make our compatriots aware of Japan’s audacity in invading China and the world” but also inform them of “the hardships involved in the eight years of resistance and the difficult victory they had achieved.” Even the buildings of the shrine itself, He claimed, were spoils of war, and should be preserved in their original appearance in order to commemorate the victory (Zhongyang ribao, 1946).

In contrast to the humanitarianism and cautious mourning of the victims presented in occupation-era commemoration, the Spoils of War Exhibition Hall offered an unabashedly triumphant monument to Nationalist China’s victory over Japan. According to the historian Li Sichun 李思純, who visited in 1946, the site was popular with visitors, particularly women, and a small cluster of stalls serving tea sprouted up near its main gate (Chen and Li, 2009: 1186). Another author, writing in 2016, recalled his childhood visit with excitement, and emphasized the presence of a Japanese aircraft that lay crumpled on the grounds, wings bent, as a symbol of Japan’s vanquished military might. Repurposing the shrine, he recalled, “destroyed the Japanese devils’ prestige and boosted the spirits of the Chinese people” (Hao, 2016: 45). Despite such youthful enthusiasm, however, adult visitors could take a more sophisticated view, and reports from 1946 suggest that the public reception of these commemorations was mixed.

Indeed, some visitors reacted to the triumphant narrative with uncertainty. Although China had won the war, it had yet to win the peace. One account noted that the exhibition hall featured the pen used by General Okamura Yasuji, commander-in-chief of the Japanese forces, to sign the surrender in Nanjing. “This pen has great historical value,” the author noted, “but if national affairs descend into chaos, then the value of the pen will be lost.” Another writer ended his account with more explicit pessimism: “As I hurried around the exhibition hall, I was genuinely excited, but also felt a sense of loss. Why? It is really hard to say. We are the nation that won the war, but how can we eternally sustain this glory?” Such a wavering response strayed far from the exhortations of He Yingqin, who had closed his remarks by urging his countrymen to redouble their efforts toward national construction and building a modern military (Xiao, 1946; Shanghai shi ri, 1946; Zhongyang ribao, 1946).

Despite the efforts of General He and others, the population of Nanjing remained shell-shocked by the trauma of war and occupation. Reflecting the inability of the Nationalist state at this time to monopolize narratives of the war, a contrasting act of commemoration took place not long after He made his nationalist appeal. On April 17, 1947, Nanjing’s local elites, including the mayor, gathered in Xiaguan to oversee the unveiling of a Monument to Fallen Colleagues to commemorate employees of the Capital Electric Plant who were ordered to remain at their posts in 1937 and were subsequently executed by the Japanese (Xiao, 1996: 155–57). Authored by the head of the plant, the stele noted the names of the dead and the circumstances in which they fell and exuded a sense of solemnity through its restrained language (Sun, 2008: 42).

By comparison, He Yingqin’s commemoration of the war in Nanjing was short-lived; hamstrung by limited resources, the returning government was unable to fully address the complex aspects of the war’s legacy amid the sense of unresolved conflicts that hung over the country. This is not to say the Nationalists were necessarily indifferent to the city’s tortured past. After the war ended, the Chinese military mission in Berlin tracked down John Rabe in his native Germany and approached him with an offer of support, including an apartment and a pension if he chose to settle in China. Rabe declined the offer, however, and despite the government’s solicitude, his wartime role went uncommemorated (Rabe, 1999: 256).

Instead, as He Yingqin and the army headquarters prepared for the formal return to Nanjing, they focused on reasserting control over the capital as a symbolic space of Nationalist rule and Chinese victory. The destruction of Wang Jingwei’s grave and the postwar hanjian (traitor) trials were part of the campaign to expunge the humiliation of invasion, as was the repurposing of the city’s Shinto shrine, but this could only paper over the city’s legacy of occupation.

These divisions, although rooted in politics and wartime experience, also extended to the personal. For instance, Peter V. Russo has described the fate of what he called “puppet wives”—women who married men who fled to the interior during the war and claimed to be widowers, only to be confronted after the war by the first wives, who had been left on the coast (Russo, 1946). These cases, which numbered in the thousands, formed the plot of the 1947 film The Spring River Flows East 一江春水向东流, and were indicative of the legacy of division that the Japanese occupation bequeathed. Even as late as 1972, John Hunter Boyle quoted a young Chinese historian who confirmed that the mere mention of Wang Jingwei’s name was “enough to divide his otherwise placid and harmonious family into two bitterly hostile factions and bring on weeks of stony silence between them” (Boyle, 1972: vii). Faced with the division between those who remained in occupied territory and those who fled, the Nationalists’ struggle to craft a legitimizing narrative of the war years faltered, while their efforts to create a unifying monument to their victory in Nanjing proved fleeting.

Class Struggle (1949–1979)

Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, space for wartime commemoration became more restricted, and even private reminders of the war were fraught (Zhu, 2014: 14–15, 63). Any discussion of the war had to fit the new national narrative of revolution, class struggle, and anti-imperialism. As Cathcart and Nash have suggested, in the 1950s, the “legacies of Japanese wartime atrocities became inextricably linked with the diplomatic and domestic goals of the CCP” (Cathcart and Nash, 2009: 1069). In particular, hostility toward the United States (brought to a boil with the Korean War) and its alliance with Nationalist-ruled Taiwan, as well as the effort to establish ties with Japan, provided further framing.

Sometime in the early 1950s, the Jiran stele was defaced. A member of a municipal inspection team caught sight of Chu Minyi’s name on it and reacted with outrage, prompting the temple leadership to quietly have the stele taken down and broken up, with Chu’s name obliterated, before abandoning it in a scrap heap on the temple grounds. ⁴ Chu’s status as a hanjian rendered the stele politically unacceptable in the PRC, and the memory of Master Jiran and his sheltering of refugees sunk into obscurity. The Spoils of War Exhibition Hall likewise fell into disuse, although when this happened is unclear, and some of the buildings and architectural features were later destroyed. ⁵

The Monument to Fallen Colleagues at the Capital Electric Plant at Xiaguan had a different fate. On June 15, 1951, the plant management decided to move the monument to a more prominent location near the compound gate, supposedly for its “educational value” (Xiao, 1996: 157). Under the new regime, however, compliance with the national narrative was more strictly enforced, so a number of changes were made to the text of the original monument. The new “Monument to Fallen Workers” included the names of two additional workers who died on February 28, 1950, during a bombing raid on Nanjing from Nationalist-ruled Taiwan, thereby linking the fallen from the Second World War with the dead of the Civil War. As the new text explained, “This memorial is erected by the Electric Plant Workers in commemoration of our forty-five fraternal workers who were persecuted to death by the Jiang Bandit Gang and the Japanese invaders, as well as two heroic colleagues who perished at their posts under bombing by Jiang’s American bombers.” Also in line with the revolutionary narrative, further down in the text, the establishment of the previous monument was derided as a scheme by the plant manager to weaken the worker’s class hatred and will to fight. “Thanks be to Chairman Mao and the Communist Party for liberating us!” was now the approved mantra, and it was inserted awkwardly into the monument’s text. The inclusion of the fallen workers remained, but the existence of what once was purely a memorial to those who lost their lives—to mourn the dead—was now reworked or justified through celebration of the revolution, class struggle, and the denunciation of perceived enemies (Sun, 2008: 43).

This reworking augured the shape of discussion of the war. Even though there were no further (known) monuments until the 1980s, it is likely that any discussion or commemoration that might have happened would have been within the framework of revolution and class struggle. Subsequent publications for internal circulation handled the period in much the same way.

In 1958, five universities in Beijing collaborated to issue a reprint of Japanese Imperialism in China’s Occupied Territory 日本帝國主義在中國淪陷區 as part of a series on China’s modern history. As a reprint from 1939 that opened with an essay by Mao Zedong on the importance of studying conditions in the occupied zone in order to support guerrilla warfare, the book represented a cautious broaching of occupation history. While the volume included discussion of the Nanjing Massacre, the authors introduced it with a disclaimer that the information was translated from records from the NSZ (Research Committee, 1958 [1939]: 2, 275).

It was under such conditions that scholars led by Gao Xingzu 高兴祖 in Nanjing University’s History Department organized a group of students to examine the topic from 1960 to 1962. Writing in the main text, which was completed in 1962, the authors singled out the foreign-run NSZ for criticism: “This committee’s intent [. . .] was to prepare a sphere of influence in occupied Nanjing, to prevent the Japanese invaders from destroying their schools, buildings, and property, to protect their interests, and at the same time prepare to do business in the refugee camps.” John Rabe, who had been praised for his compassion (as having “the heart of the Buddha”) by grateful Nanjing refugees in 1938, was now dismissed as a mere figurehead; it was the Americans who ran the operation from behind the scenes, and Rabe’s interactions with the Japanese were either an attempt to ingratiate himself or to inform against Chinese troops hiding in the Safety Zone (Rabe, 1999: 168; Department of History, 1979: 51). Even more inflammatorily, the authors accused the committee of cooperating with the Japanese, quoting one survivor that “the refugee camp was simply a shady shop for selling human flesh, and the American devils were the evil shopkeepers” (Department of History, 1979: 48, 53). The purpose of this Cold War framing, Gao reportedly admitted some years later, was to make the work publishable (Paris, 2001: 156). Unsurprisingly, Rabe’s former residence in Nanjing remained neglected and littered with trash during these years, only to be restored after a 2003 visit to China by German president Johannes Rau (Zhang, 2006). In any event, plans to publish the work with the Jiangsu People’s Press fell through, leaving the scholars involved to move on to other projects.

It was only in 1965, working through “relevant foreign affairs units” that the historians at Nanjing University were able to bring their research to partial fruition. Here the editors mention the interest of unnamed Japanese friends who wanted to understand the period—possibly a reference to journalists like Honda Katsuichi, who were returning the period to the public eye in Japan—and it was for these friends that they were able to convene a report meeting and photography exhibition. Such was the gratitude of these friends upon viewing the materials, the editors report, that one after another they pledged eternal friendship with the Chinese people (Department of History, 1979: 1–2, 111–12).

By 1979, when the work was finally allowed to be published, the scholars at Nanjing University retrospectively positioned their undertaking within the revolutionary narrative and current party policy with a newly written introduction. “We consistently adhere to the Party Central’s guiding principle on rigorously distinguishing between a small group of militarists and the Japanese people,” they insisted, and “treasure the two thousand year history of cultural exchange and friendly relations between China and Japan as well as the deep friendships between the people of the two countries that have formed over the course of our long history, and solemnly hope that the peoples of China and Japan continue in friendship for eternity” (Department of History, 1979: 1). Along with this desire for friendship, however, they had another, more contemporary motive for exploring the wartime period.

Looking outward, the editors decried an “extremely small number” of reactionary works that that sought to erase history. More importantly, the authors noted,

It was precisely this war of invasion started by the small group of militarists that ruined the national independence of the Japanese people, and caused Japan to fall under the exclusive occupation of the United States in the early period after the war. [. . .] In fact, militarism is equally the enemy of the Japanese people, and the people of Japan resolutely oppose militarism. For this reason, summarizing this painful historical event is done in order to draw a lesson, to oppose the common enemy of the Chinese and Japanese peoples, and oppose invasion from wherever it might come. (Department of History, 1979: 2)

Nonetheless, the narrative of revolution fit uneasily with wartime history, particularly in Nanjing, with its complex experience of war, massacre, and occupation. As far as can be determined, public commemoration the war came to a halt after the 1951 update to the Memorial to Fallen Colleagues and did not resume until the 1980s.

Conclusion

Much of Nanjing’s earliest commemorative sites and monuments have been forgotten, with traces of their physical presence in the city and its museums easily overlooked. Nevertheless, there is much to learn from the history of these sites and objects and the narratives of the war surrounding them. In particular, in China attention to the period is not merely the product of party propaganda. Commemoration in Nanjing began far earlier than the 1980s; some examples even date back to 1937, while the city was under Japanese occupation. In this regard, occupation officials were ahead of their counterparts in unoccupied territory, where even a literary portrayal of the Nanjing Massacre ran up against political taboos (Berry, 2017: 459). These early acts of commemoration began not in response to disillusionment with Communist ideology, a nationalist need to rally the people to the flag, or a desire to rebut Japanese denial and distortion of wartime events, but were part of local processes of laying the dead to rest and recalling lives lost, and are closer to the notion of sites of mourning described by Jay Winter.

Early commemorations notwithstanding, local memories of occupation have since gone mostly unrecorded, as Edward Vickers and Diana Lary have emphasized (Vickers, 2018: 48; Lary, 2015), and a public commemoration of the war that fully integrates the view from Nanjing—a national capital lost, occupied, regained, and then demoted—has yet to be built. Just as it did for the returning Nationalists in 1945, Nanjing’s history of massacre, occupation, and collaboration defies easy commemoration today, yet it is hardly alone, with many other places in China carrying similarly tortured histories of occupation and its aftermath. Instead, we are left with a fragmented history of commemoration characterized by omission and erasure, with monuments that diverge from the “national” resistance narrative expunged, modified, or reinterpreted. Just as Gao Guanwu’s name likely made it possible for the Stele of Lost Souls to be erected in 1939, so too it exposed the stele to attack after the war. In 1985, the opening of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall prompted the “rediscovery” of Gao’s long-forgotten stele in the form of a photograph donated to the hall by an elderly local resident, though this has yet to spur any reassessment in the PRC of Gao or the regimes in which he served (Yin, 1987). Where once it earned him praise and criticism, by the 1980s Gao’s endeavor to commemorate the dead was merely another piece of evidence in the Nanjing body count, useful now in damning the Japanese for their wartime atrocity (Zhu, 2007: 19). Similarly, John Rabe’s reputation in the city went from Buddha-hearted protector and recipient of aid from a grateful Chinese nation to American stooge and relative unknown before he was finally re-acknowledged in 2005 for his heroism and compassion.

Despite this record, the struggle to commemorate the Nanjing Massacre from the wartime period on up to the work of Nanjing University historians suggests that the people of Nanjing did not forget their war dead, even if the nature of commemoration has been caught up in the political imperatives of the Chinese party-state. In more recent years, the enlargement of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall (1995, 2007, and again in 2015–2016); the lionization of John Rabe and the restoration of his house as a commemorative site (2003); and the opening of the Lijixiang Comfort Women Memorial (2015), all of which have cast further light on the occupation of Nanjing, suggest that the resurgence of wartime commemorations of the 1980s has yet to slow. Nor has the administration of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping shrunk from wielding the power of the state over wartime history and commemoration, as is evident in the recent decree that school textbooks must mark the beginning of the war as 1931, rather than 1937, as has long been the case. As these renovations suggest, the wartime legacy continues to cast a shadow not only over the People’s Republic and its relationships with the outside world, but over the built environment of Nanjing itself.

Finally, despite the zigs and zags in China’s evolving wartime narrative, what Timothy Brook termed the moral certainty of PRC state ideology (Brook, 2012: 106) remains unshaken. Nanjing’s fragments and ruins notwithstanding, the primacy of the state in managing historical memory and enforcing moral judgment endures and, as in the periods described above, whether and how space is made available for public commemoration continues to be determined by the Chinese party-state in accordance with its evolving political priorities.