Abstract
Remembering the War of Resistance against Japan is central to China’s memory and identity politics. By focusing on the production of China’s War of Resistance television dramas, this study analyzes how collective memory is shaped by market actors and their interactions with the state. The first substantive section investigates how commercial media and the state cooperate in the production of War of Resistance television dramas. The second explicates how market actors undermine the state’s ideological imperatives by adding entertainment content to repackage war memory, which then conflicts with the propagandistic task. This study contributes to introducing the market factor to research on the remembering of War of Resistance in China and enriching the political economy of memory approach by examining an authoritarian state-capitalist case, which is centrally characterized by these cooperative and conflictual relations between the state and the market.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 877-891 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Memory Studies |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Early online date | 23 Jun 2021 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Aug 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We are grateful to Anthony Fung, Emil Lundedal Hammer, James Reilly, Peter Gries, and Stephen Nagy, and anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.
Keywords
- Chinese media
- collective memory
- political economy
- state capitalism
- television drama
- War of Resistance
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Psychology
- Cultural Studies
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology