This panel investigates the politics of memory-making in China and beyond, conceptualising the memory of difficult pasts as a contested arena shaped by multiple agents—from state authorities to grassroots communities, encompassing gendered, local, and transnational dimensions. By tracing both top-down and bottom-up memory practices, the panel asks: Who governs memory, and what are the political stakes of such governance?
The panel opens with state-led memory projects. Liping Peng examines how architecture shapes collective memory, using Nanchang's August 1st Uprising Memorial Hall as a case study, showing how physical structures reinforce political legitimacy and ideological continuity. Fan Bu extends this state-focused lens through a transnational comparison of China and South Korea, highlighting how gendered versus de-gendered narratives mediate between trauma, nationalism, and intergenerational memory transmission.
Turning to memory from below, Xiaochun Ma explores contested memory-making at Fangtze Eurotown in Weifang, revealing how local communities engage with colonial heritage to produce multidirectional memory that negotiates, rather than directly confronts, official narratives. Building on this focus on grassroots practices, Beixi Sun examines the Lushun Russo-Japanese Prison Museum, demonstrating how peace-oriented commemoration can paradoxically generate antagonistic affect among visitors, highlighting the complex gap between commemorative intentions and emotional outcomes within East Asia's memory landscape.
Together, these papers map a continuum of memory governance—from state-led efforts to grassroots negotiation—revealing how memory landscapes are continuously shaped through the interplay of spatial, narrative, and emotional practices. By connecting top-down and bottom-up perspectives across national and transnational contexts, the panel illuminates the power struggles inherent in contested memory and heritage negotiation, opening new pathways for understanding peace-building in an increasingly transcultural world.
Liping Peng, Politecnico di Milano, Governance Memory through Space: The Nanchang August 1st Uprising Memorial Hall
This study examines how architecture influences collective memory in modern China, using the August 1st Uprising Memorial Hall in Nanchang as a case study. Originally constructed as a hotel in the 1920s, the building has undergone repeated renovations and reinterpretations, evolving from a revolutionary command center to a National Museum of Red Cultural Heritage. This ongoing transformation demonstrates how political memories are physically embedded into heritage sites.
The research employs methods such as archival research, policy analysis, and field surveys. It aims to explore how institutional mechanisms shaped the conversion of this historical structure into a symbolic monument. It also investigates architectural changes like structural renovations, facade restorations, and exhibition redesigns to discuss how these create spatial narratives of unity and sacrifice that align with state ideologies. These material and curatorial choices reveal how state-driven heritage preservation transforms ordinary buildings into performative memorial spaces, gradually undermining the building’s original architectural integrity and everyday historical memories.
By viewing memory as a spatial practice rather than a purely theoretical concept, this paper argues that Nanchang’s Red Cultural Heritage exemplifies how physical structures reinforce political legitimacy and ideological continuity. The case highlights architecture’s role in managing collective memory, showcasing both the institutional power and inherent limitations of heritage-based commemoration in contemporary China.
Fan Bu, The University of Sydney, (De)Gendering Traumatic Memory: the Politics of ‘Comfort Women’ Commemoration and Representation in China and South Korea
During World War II, the Imperial Japanese military forced thousands of women into sexual slavery, a systematic and institutionalized form of war rape known as the ‘comfort women’ system. Despite eight decades have passed since the war’s end, the issue was not properly resolved, with Japan continuing to avoid formal accountability. While China and South Korea were the greatest victimhood and share similar cultural context, their approaches to commemorating ‘comfort women’ diverge significantly, reflecting distinct memory politics.
This paper examines how state-sanctioned memorial landscapes in China and South Korea construct competing memory of ‘comfort women’ system, shaping public perceptions of wartime sexual violence. In South Korean, museum and other memory practices employ affective strategies centering individual survivors’ testimonies to construct a gendered collective memory. By contrast, Chinese representations tend to integrate the issue within an anti-imperialist framework, framing victims as symbols of national suffering while downplaying gendered trauma to patriotic pedagogy.
Through a comparative analysis of museum spaces, exhibits, archival materials, and interpretations, this study argues that China’s de-gendered, collectivist narrative reinforces state-controlled memory, while South Korea’s gendered approach encourages civic engagement. This divergence illustrates how memory institutions mediate between trauma and nationalism, with implications for intergenerational transmission. Ultimately, the paper interrogates how (de)gendered representations challenge or reproduce hegemonic historiography within East Asia’s contested memorial landscapes, complicating homogenized understandings of postcolonial war memory in East Asia.
Xiaochun Ma, Australian National University, Dwelling in Palimpsests: Memory Negotiations at Fangtze Eurotown.
This paper examines contested memory-making at Fangtze Eurotown in Weifang, China—a former German-Japanese colonial site repurposed as a heritage tourism destination. Developed for coal extraction along the Jiaoji Railway, the site flourished as an industrial hub until the 1980s, when resource depletion and railway rerouting triggered economic decline. Today, it exists in a state of managed ruination, where spatial preservation of 1970s-1980s aesthetics intersects with ongoing state-capital-driven heritagisation processes.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis, this study explores how multidirectional memory emerges through local communities' engagements with colonial remains amid ongoing selective curation into official narratives. While state-led tourism and urban renewal initiatives depoliticise the site's complex colonial socialist past into consumable nostalgia, residents actively produce alternative memory practices: curating private museums with vernacular collections, creating commemorative content on digital platforms, offering oral histories to visitors, and maintaining everyday life within heritage structures.
This study reveals that memory making at Fangtze operates beyond the binaries of strategic commemoration and forgetting. Official narratives instrumentalise the site for patriotic education while aestheticising and depoliticising its layered pasts. Yet local memory work persists as quiet resistance—not through overt opposition, but through parallel streams of meaning-making that recover colonial violence and complicate singular heritage interpretations.
Theoretically, this research contributes to memory studies by conceptualising colonial heritage as palimpsests where temporal layers—colonial, socialist, post-industrial, tourist—coexist and compete. It challenges the dichotomy of official versus counter memory, instead revealing how memory activism under constraints unfolds through subtle acts of preservation, circulation in marginal spaces, and the embodied inhabitation of heritage. Ultimately, this study reimagines difficult heritage as a field that foregrounds local voices and fosters critical reflection across generational and geopolitical boundaries.
20260731T154520260731T1715America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires10.10. Governing Memory: Power, Negotiation, and Emotion in China and BeyondSVE3MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
