Jody Musgrove

China’s modern history (1839- ) does not lack devastating and traumatic episodes for memorialisation. The nearly two centuries in question are filled with revolution, famine, drought, war, and civil unrest. Why and how then, did 1937’s Nanjing massacre rise to the very top of a contemporary Chinese calendar of traumatic remembrance? Applying the theories of sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander, this article will argue that the Chinese Communist Party first actively suppressed, then deliberately chose to reconstruct the events at Nanjing as a national level trauma - an intentional wound on the collective Chinese psyche - to foster nationalism and loyalty during a time of crisis. The key to this traumatic construction has been representation.

This essay considers the deeply political forgetting and remembering of 1937's Nanjing Massacre. It first considers the circumstances surrounding the political forgetting , then the deliberate remembering using the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum as a backdrop to the inculcation of a national trauma.

The release of Iris Chang's 1997 book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII was a pivotal moment in the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre, especially in the West. This essay details the before and the after, and the enduring legacy of Chang's book.

The situation in Xinjiang continues to deteriorate with the jailing of Uyghur scholar, Ilham Tohti a new low in the relationship between the minority and the state. This report discusses the current situation and suggests that religion, as much as it is part of the problem, may also offer a potential solution.