A Literature Review of the Production and Consumption of Anti-Japanese Narratives in Mainland China

Abstract

The anti-Japanese discourse has undergone a process from amnesia to remembrance in the Chinese public sphere. Based on existing research on the production and consumption of anti-Japanese narratives, this paper reviews three paradigms respectively emphasizing political manipulation in the production process, collective cultural trauma, and relative autonomy of social agents in the reception process. The vector of research on this topic is a process of dialectical negation. Research from the cultural trauma perspective accepts the premise deriving from political manipulation that individuals' traumatic memory about Japanese invaders in Mao's era did not step into the territory of the public sphere but negates the instrumental approach of political manipulation from a cultural sociological perspective. This paper hints that research revealing the hidden resistant power of social agents also negates the fundamental premise held by the two former paradigms. This paper suggests researchers turn from the production to the consumption of anti-Japanese narratives and rely more on oral history as well as ethnographic fieldwork, rather than mainstream literature in the future.