ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Lary analyzes the complex relationship between private and public memorialization through the exploration of individual and national mourning following China's ‘War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression’ (1937–1945). She shows that private as well as public commemorative practice has been influenced by politics, and by the experience of Civil War that immediately followed the Resistance War. Official commemorations, that have proliferated across the calendar in recent years, were long associated with suffering and outrage rather than with victory or remembrance of the war dead. After a long period when the Resistance War had few memorial sites, there are now an enormous number of public museums and sites dedicated to this conflict. Private ceremonies have traditionally taken place around festivals such as the Lunar New Year and Qingming, the marking of which was problematic throughout much of the Maoist era. And while private family rituals ought to be conducted at the graves of the dead, many of them have no graves.
