China's century of humiliation was also a century of trauma. Revolutions and wars produced a plethora of violent and untimely deaths in the Republican era. How the Nationalist state builders turned these tragic, premature demises into sacred martyrdoms for party- and nation-building purposes, and the political and social consequences of these commemorative enterprises, is the main subject of Linh D. Vu's monograph Governing the Dead. Vu argues that “the capacity to discipline the tens of millions of war dead—to control their physical and rhetorical presence—was critical to the state-building project in twentieth-century China” (p. 8). Building upon the theoretical premises proposed by Thomas Laqueur, Achille Mbembe, Drew Gilpin Faust, Jay Winter, Maria Rashid, and more, Vu illuminates in great detail the ways in which the new Republican revolutionary memorial apparatus absorbed rituals of popular folk religions and co-opted traditional Confucian values. As she rightly suggests, the Republican state under the Nationalists was “politically revolutionary but socially conservative” (p. 192). The Nationalist commemorative projects and compensation schemes contributed to the consolidation of modern Chinese national identity, specifically in helping shape a particular form of militant and masculine male citizenship and the subservient role of women as virtuous wives and good mothers. They also led to the glorification and normalization of violence—“democratization” of necrocitizenry and “civilianization of war”—paving the way for mass mobilization and militarization of society in Mao's China.
Vu starts with the honoring of seventy-two Yellow Flower Hill martyrs, the last failed attempt to topple Qing rule before the success of the Wuchang Uprising (1911 Revolution). In chapter 1, she shows that in the 1920s, the Nationalist Party belatedly rewrote these regional “revolutionary terrorists” into national martyrdom in order “to displace regional power holders such as Chen Jiongming and Beiyang leaders such as Yuan Shikai from the history of the modern Chinese state” (p. 49).
Chapter 2 focuses on the institutionalization of the Nationalist commemorative/compensation regime through the construction of Loyal Martyrs’ Shrines. The dispute among Nationalist leaders surfaced regarding who should be memorialized and on what grounds, and which next of kin were in line to receive state benefits. Driving the dispute was the power struggle between Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei. The former sought loyalty and support from soldiers by expanding the party-state's lionized necrocitizenry to those who fought in the Northern Expedition. The latter wanted to limit such membership to the old 1911 revolutionary martyrs to curb Chiang's rising power and influence.
Chapter 3 provides a further discussion of state compensation regime from the perspective of the bereaved. Vu demonstrates unevenness in the distribution of state benefits due to bureaucratic red tape and the discordance between central and local governments. The effectiveness of each grieving family's petition depended not only on its social status and political connections, but, more importantly, on the family's knowledge of the state's compensatory regulations and fluency in the Nationalist language of loyalty, neo-Confucian morality, and affect.
Chapter 4 turns the reader's attention to women in the bereaved family. It underscores a sort of mediated or negotiated agency where relatively powerless widows skillfully adopted or performed the state's ideal notion of Confucian female virtue and used the state's backing to their advantage against other powerful male relatives and claimants in the family.
Chapter 5 examines what Vu terms “democratization of martyrdom” and “civilianization of war” during the Resistance War and followed by the Chinese Civil War. Facing foreign occupation and forced to retreat inland, the displaced Nationalist regime encouraged everyone to rise up against the Japanese invaders. The national martyrdom was extended to the entire population. Yet, inadequate financial resources and persistent conflict between central and local authorities diminished the efficacy of the Nationalist projects. The epilogue makes comparisons between the commemorative regimes of the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China after 1949 and discusses some contemporary implications.
The book is meticulously researched and elegantly written. It is theoretically thought-provoking and also broadly comparative with state-sponsored war remembrance, compensation regimes, and necropolitics in other parts of the world. This impressive work is the fruit of multiyear research in eleven national, provincial, and municipal archives and libraries in China and Taiwan. Vu relies on a multitude of primary sources to tell her story: bureaucratic records, petition letters, government gazettes, periodicals, and other printed materials. The monograph should be of interest to specialists of modern China and East Asia, and to the much larger global readership interested in memory studies, necropolitics, state-society relations, women's agency, and masculine war culture.
No book is impeccable. Some readers might find the coverage of female martyrdom, architectural aesthetics of commemorative structures, and Chinese Civil War period commemoration a little thin in this work. The argument that women's negotiated agency, together with the biopolitics that developed under the Nationalists, later evolved into the Chinese Communist Party's infamous “One-Child Policy” (p. 124) seems to make sense in the context of Vu's discussion. However, the Nationalist regime continued to exist on Taiwan after 1949. Though the same masculine and conservative nationalism continued, the exiled regime on Taiwan never developed such rigorous policy to govern women's choice over reproduction compared with the People's Republic of China. Lastly, instead of “democratization” of martyrdom, “proliferation” might be a better word, since there was nothing “democratic” about the Nationalist commemorative apparatus.
