Description
Book SynopsisIn 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
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Manufacturing Republican Martyrdom
2. Defining the Necrocitizenry
3. Consoling the Bereaved
4. Gendering the Republic
5. Democratizing National Martyrdom
Epilogue
