Sites of Memory as ‘Patriotic Education Bases’ in the People’s Republic of China: The Case of the ‘Lüshun Massacre’ Memorial

In the 1990s, the leadership of the People’s Republic of China launched a major national ‘patriotic education campaign’. The campaign aimed to revive the sense of patriotism and national cohesion among people in post-Maoist China. At the time, hundreds of historical sites were bestowed the status of ‘patriotic education bases’, playing a key role in rebuilding the collective historical memory and educating the people – above all, the younger generations – on the humiliations China had suffered in the past due to the aggression by foreign powers (namely the West and Japan). Foreign aggressions and the sufferings endured by Chinese people during the so-called ‘century of national humiliation’ (1842-1945) were thus chosen as a trauma to be remembered in the collective historical memory and the official narrative of China’s past (Wang 2012; Denton 2014). This paper focuses on one ‘patriotic education base’, the cemetery and memorial dedicated to the victims of the ‘Lüshun Massacre’ (also known as the ‘Port Arthur Massacre’) perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese Army in November 1894, during the first Sino-Japanese conflict. The paper, which also relies on data collected during a visit to the site, aims to investigate how the different languages that compose the heterogeneous museum and commemorative area of the Memorial contribute to the highly ideological historical narrative of China’s past and the Sino-Japanese conflicts.