Books by Linh D. Vu
In Governing the Dead, Linh D. Vu explains how the Chinese Nationalist regime consolidated contro... more In Governing the Dead, Linh D. Vu explains how the Chinese Nationalist regime consolidated control by honoring its millions of war dead, allowing China to emerge rapidly from the wreckage of the first half of the twentieth century to become a powerful state, supported by strong nationalistic sentiment and institutional infrastructure.
The fall of the empire, internecine conflicts, foreign invasion, and war-related disasters claimed twenty to thirty million Chinese lives. Vu draws on government records, newspapers, and petition letters from mourning families to analyze how the Nationalist regime's commemoration of the dead and compensation of the bereaved actually fortified its central authority. By enshrining the victims of violence as national ancestors, the Republic of China connected citizenship to the idea of the nation, promoting loyalty to the "imagined community." The regime constructed China's first public military cemetery and hundreds of martyrs' shrines, collectively mourned millions of fallen soldiers and civilians, and disbursed millions of yuan to tens of thousands of widows and orphans. The regime thus exerted control over the living by creating the state apparatus necessary to manage the dead.
Although the Communist forces prevailed in 1949, the Nationalists had already laid the foundation for the modern nation-state through their governance of dead citizens. The Nationalist policies of glorifying and compensating the loyal dead in an age of catastrophic destruction left an important legacy: violence came to be celebrated rather than lamented.
Articles by Linh D. Vu
In 1950, the People's Republic of China began transforming the Eight Treasures Mountain (Babaosha... more In 1950, the People's Republic of China began transforming the Eight Treasures Mountain (Babaoshan) into a national cemetery for its highest-ranking cadres and most devoted supporters. This article advances our understanding of how the People's Republic of China revolutionizes the way it uses the dead to legitimize its rule over the living. While the People's Republic of China seeks to erase the Imperial and Republican past, it follows its predecessors in shaping national memory by creating a sacred site for the loyal dead. Furthermore, despite atheist self-proclamation, the People's Republic of China relies on traditional beliefs and practices to memorialize its dead members. The state's attempts to shape national memory through these means have not been without resistance from the bereaved families, particularly under controversial circumstances. Besides these unsettled conflicts, the People's Republic of China faces the challenges posed by a growing number of the dead. The People's Republic of China tries to manage its necro-constituents by turning to information technology and eco-burial.
Transposed Memory: Visual Sites of National Recollection in 20th and 21st Century East Asia, 2024
Preview: Each area is a cluster of museums, memorials, historic structures, landmarks, tombs of f... more Preview: Each area is a cluster of museums, memorials, historic structures, landmarks, tombs of famous persons, and so on. Four sites—the Longhua Martyrs’ Cemetery, the Memorial Hall of the First National Congress of the CCP, the Grave of Soong Ching-Ling (1893–1981), and the Former Residence and Memorial Hall of Chen Yun (1905–95)—constitute the Shanghai “red tourism” cluster. 7 The Longhua Martyrs’ Cemetery, the largest site, is located in the Xuhui District, which was part of the French concession and is now a commercially zoned urban district with some residential areas. The Shanghai municipal government presents the Longhua Martyrs’ Cemetery as “one of the most representative red tourist resorts in China,” and also underlines its function as a principal base for patriotic education and socialist construction. 8 Revolutionary commemoration has become an opportunity for vacation, and in the case of …
Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2023
Although local authorities, communities and charities played a major role in dealing with conflic... more Although local authorities, communities and charities played a major role in dealing with conflict fatalities, the Republican era (1911-49) saw new government initiatives to attend to the afterlives of common soldiers. Leaders of the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) exemplified ambitions to govern the dead by implementing a policy of collecting and burying fallen soldiers. As the first public military cemetery, constructed in Nanjing in 1935, could not accommodate the millions of war dead in the decade of war that followed, the Nationalist state promulgated regulations to help bereaved families transport remains back to their home towns for burial. The Nationalist government began to plan more national military cemeteries after World War II, yet most commemorative projects in mainland China were interrupted by the Chinese Civil War. By constructing martyrs' shrines and national cemeteries in Taiwan, the Nationalists are continuing their efforts to look after the military dead.
This article addresses the Taipei National Revolutionary Martyrs' Shrine (Guomin geming zhonglie ... more This article addresses the Taipei National Revolutionary Martyrs' Shrine (Guomin geming zhonglie ci) as a site of contention over national sovereignty and belonging. The shrine originated in Sun Yat-sen's aspiration to commemorate the anti-imperial martyrs of the 1911 Republic and in the Nationalist government's attempt to marshal political allegiance in the 1920s-1940s. Upon fleeing from the mainland to Taiwan after losing to the Communist forces in 1949, the Nationalist leadership renovated the Japanesebuilt National Protection Shrine in Taipei, transforming it into the National Revolutionary Martyrs' Shrine to house the displaced spirits of the national dead. Throughout the Cold War era, the spring and autumn sacrifices performed by heads of state and visits to the shrine by foreign dignities served to affirm the sovereignty of the Republic of China vis-à-vis the People's Republic of China. Even though the end of martial law in 1987 opened a new era marked by the Nationalist Party's loss of political hegemony, the shrine continued to adhere to the Nationalist Party's ideology and version of history. Far from embodying a place of remembrance and mourning for war victims, the palace-style compound is a site of contested sovereignty exaggerated by China's extraordinary growth and Taiwan's transforming identity. The enshrined dead have found a new role as both an assertion of the island's autonomy and a reflection of its dynamism. The departed, albeit silent, hold power in the malleability of their memories, and each permutation of how the past is remembered hosts its own tension.
Modern China, 2019
This article draws attention to the cultural and social specificities of women's agency in Republ... more This article draws attention to the cultural and social specificities of women's agency in Republican China and suggests a way to rethink the polarizing impacts of revolution-and war-related deaths on women's lives. Analyzing a number of petitions submitted by widows of martyrs, this article explores the transformation in family-state and gender relations during the Republican era. I argue that the Nationalist martyr compensation law perpetuated the imperial-era standards for the feminine virtues of chastity and sacrifice, circumscribing women's social and political roles in twentieth-century China. Under the new equality-promoting legal regime and in the absence of familial patriarchs, women had new opportunities to venture outside their domestic quarters and to engage with the state. Yet, the Republican state often made exceptions to the law based on petitioners' display of feminine virtues. By entering into this negotiation of virtue with the state, Chinese women defined themselves primarily through their performance of moral qualities.
Exploring the construction and maintenance of Nationalist Chinese soldiers' graves overseas, this... more Exploring the construction and maintenance of Nationalist Chinese soldiers' graves overseas, this article sheds light on post-World War II commemorative politics. After having fought for the Allies against Japanese aggression in the China-Burma-India Theater, the Chinese expeditionary troops sporadically received posthumous care from Chinese veterans and diaspora groups. In the Southeast Asia Theater, the Chinese soldiers imprisoned in the Japanese-run camps in Rabaul were denied burial in the Allied war cemetery and recognition as military heroes. Analyzing archival documents from China, Taiwan, Britain, Australia, and the United States, I demonstrate how the afterlife of Chinese servicemen under foreign sovereignties mattered in the making of the modern Chinese state and its international status.
Dissertation by Linh D. Vu
Dissertation, 2017
The anti-imperial uprisings, the warlord power struggle, the War of Resistance, and the Chinese C... more The anti-imperial uprisings, the warlord power struggle, the War of Resistance, and the Chinese Civil War took twenty to thirty million lives. Half of the casualties were civilian. Republican China, not unlike the Union government during the American Civil War and the European states during the First World War, began to manage the war dead. My dissertation, titled “The Sovereignty of the War Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and the Makings of Modern China, 1912-1949,” examines Republican China’s effort to collect, commemorate, and compensate military and civilian dead in the first half of the twentieth century. I analyze how various government policies, such as the construction of martyrs’ shrines in every county, the tracking of casualties by locality, the compilation of martyrs’ biographies, and the distribution of gratuities to families of the war dead, contributed to the processes of state-building and nation-making in China and shaped China’s social and cultural institutions in most profound ways. The toppling of the Manchu ruling class and the Confucian-educated elites did not lead to the construction of China as a nation of equal citizens. Republican China instead developed new political hierarchies through the promulgation of different regulations for compensating revolutionary predecessors, Party members, servicemembers, and bureaucrats, and their families exclusively. Conflicts of the unprecedented scale prompted the Nationalist state to extend its constituency by broadening the criteria for martyrdom to include civilians and pledging to provide for qualified bereaved family members. In exchange for recognition and compensation, family members had to demonstrate not only their allegiance to the party-state, but also their compliance to the moral codes prescribed by the state. As for the dead, their spirits dwelled in government-mandated Loyal Martyrs’ Shrines (zhonglie ci), where the living performed a combination of traditional and modern rituals to memorialize their untimely departure.
My dissertation advances our understanding of violence in the modern age. In twentieth-century China, conflicts were viewed as rational political choices, inevitable in the modern age, and inseparable from human experience, laying the rhetorical ground for further violence. Examining the changes in compensation and commemoration law from the 1910s to 1940s, I demonstrate that two processes – the bureaucratization of death (the construction of deaths with numbers and formulaic narratives) and the civilianization of war (increased presence of civilians in war as victims, supporters and penetrators) – contributed to the routinization of violence in postwar China. Political struggles from the 1950s to the present testify to how wars of earlier decades have normalized death in the cultural, social, and economic realms. Furthermore, I propose that the dead have sovereignty as their oft-perceived formidable power in the afterlife necessitates that political, social, and cultural institutions develop the means to control the way by which they are remembered. The sheer number of the dead, the eerie specter of their wronged souls, and the multiplicity of their memorialized identities upset the core of human existence.
Unpublished Papers by Linh D. Vu
Reviews by Linh D. Vu
Twentieth-Century China, 2024
Cultural and Literary Representations of the Automobile in French Indochina: A Colonial Roadshow ... more Cultural and Literary Representations of the Automobile in French Indochina: A Colonial Roadshow focuses on the history and representations of the automobile in French Indochina. Stéphanie Ponsavady's goal is to "fill in the gap in the narrative of French conquest in Southeast Asia," bringing the colonial history of Indochina into the history of France (). The author uses archival, literary, and filmic sources-mostly French and some Vietnamese in translation-to illustrate the roles of roads, cars, and passengers in colonial Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Those who are interested in French colonialism, literature and cinema, mobility studies, and Vietnamese history will find the book valuable.
Uploads
Books by Linh D. Vu
The fall of the empire, internecine conflicts, foreign invasion, and war-related disasters claimed twenty to thirty million Chinese lives. Vu draws on government records, newspapers, and petition letters from mourning families to analyze how the Nationalist regime's commemoration of the dead and compensation of the bereaved actually fortified its central authority. By enshrining the victims of violence as national ancestors, the Republic of China connected citizenship to the idea of the nation, promoting loyalty to the "imagined community." The regime constructed China's first public military cemetery and hundreds of martyrs' shrines, collectively mourned millions of fallen soldiers and civilians, and disbursed millions of yuan to tens of thousands of widows and orphans. The regime thus exerted control over the living by creating the state apparatus necessary to manage the dead.
Although the Communist forces prevailed in 1949, the Nationalists had already laid the foundation for the modern nation-state through their governance of dead citizens. The Nationalist policies of glorifying and compensating the loyal dead in an age of catastrophic destruction left an important legacy: violence came to be celebrated rather than lamented.
Articles by Linh D. Vu
Dissertation by Linh D. Vu
My dissertation advances our understanding of violence in the modern age. In twentieth-century China, conflicts were viewed as rational political choices, inevitable in the modern age, and inseparable from human experience, laying the rhetorical ground for further violence. Examining the changes in compensation and commemoration law from the 1910s to 1940s, I demonstrate that two processes – the bureaucratization of death (the construction of deaths with numbers and formulaic narratives) and the civilianization of war (increased presence of civilians in war as victims, supporters and penetrators) – contributed to the routinization of violence in postwar China. Political struggles from the 1950s to the present testify to how wars of earlier decades have normalized death in the cultural, social, and economic realms. Furthermore, I propose that the dead have sovereignty as their oft-perceived formidable power in the afterlife necessitates that political, social, and cultural institutions develop the means to control the way by which they are remembered. The sheer number of the dead, the eerie specter of their wronged souls, and the multiplicity of their memorialized identities upset the core of human existence.
Unpublished Papers by Linh D. Vu
Reviews by Linh D. Vu
The fall of the empire, internecine conflicts, foreign invasion, and war-related disasters claimed twenty to thirty million Chinese lives. Vu draws on government records, newspapers, and petition letters from mourning families to analyze how the Nationalist regime's commemoration of the dead and compensation of the bereaved actually fortified its central authority. By enshrining the victims of violence as national ancestors, the Republic of China connected citizenship to the idea of the nation, promoting loyalty to the "imagined community." The regime constructed China's first public military cemetery and hundreds of martyrs' shrines, collectively mourned millions of fallen soldiers and civilians, and disbursed millions of yuan to tens of thousands of widows and orphans. The regime thus exerted control over the living by creating the state apparatus necessary to manage the dead.
Although the Communist forces prevailed in 1949, the Nationalists had already laid the foundation for the modern nation-state through their governance of dead citizens. The Nationalist policies of glorifying and compensating the loyal dead in an age of catastrophic destruction left an important legacy: violence came to be celebrated rather than lamented.
My dissertation advances our understanding of violence in the modern age. In twentieth-century China, conflicts were viewed as rational political choices, inevitable in the modern age, and inseparable from human experience, laying the rhetorical ground for further violence. Examining the changes in compensation and commemoration law from the 1910s to 1940s, I demonstrate that two processes – the bureaucratization of death (the construction of deaths with numbers and formulaic narratives) and the civilianization of war (increased presence of civilians in war as victims, supporters and penetrators) – contributed to the routinization of violence in postwar China. Political struggles from the 1950s to the present testify to how wars of earlier decades have normalized death in the cultural, social, and economic realms. Furthermore, I propose that the dead have sovereignty as their oft-perceived formidable power in the afterlife necessitates that political, social, and cultural institutions develop the means to control the way by which they are remembered. The sheer number of the dead, the eerie specter of their wronged souls, and the multiplicity of their memorialized identities upset the core of human existence.