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Martyrs, Memorials, and the Makings of Modern China, 1912-1949 by Linh Dam Vu a Dissertation Su

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Martyrs, Memorials, and the Makings of Modern China, 1912-1949 by Linh Dam Vu a Dissertation Su The Sovereignty of the War Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and the Makings of Modern China, 1912-1949 By Linh Dam Vu A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Wen-hsin Yeh, Chair Professor Peter Zinoman Professor Thomas Laqueur Professor Kevin O’Brien Summer 2017 1 Abstract The Sovereignty of the War Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and the Makings of Modern China, 1912-1949 by Linh Dam Vu Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Wen-hsin Yeh, Chair 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 2 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. i Table of Contents page Acknowledgements ii Notes on Archival Sources iii List of Figures iv Introduction 1 Part I: Imperial Origins, Republican Visions, and Nationalist Ambitions, 1911-1925 18 Chapter 1: Great Han Revolutionaries and Pro-State Martyrs 19 Chapter 2: Republican Martyrdom 43 Part II: The Guangzhou-Nanjing Era, 1925-1937 77 Chapter 3: Martyr Enshrinement and Nationalist Religiosity 78 Chapter 4: The Makings of the Nationalist State 111 Chapter 5: Patriarchal State, Gendered Republic 154 Part III: Global Wars and the Making of Modern China, 1937-1949 184 Chapter 6: Bureaucratization of Death, Civilianization of War 185 Chapter 7: A Shrine in Every County 235 Chapter 8: Mobilizing the Dead in Wartime Chongqing 274 Chapter 9: Bones of Contention: Chinese Soldiers’ Cemeteries in India, Burma, and Papua New Guinea 299 Epilogue 332 Bibliography 336 Appendix 365 ii Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been completed without the tremendous amount of encouragement and critique from the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Peter Zinoman, Andrew Barshay, Andrew Jones, Charles Briggs, Nicolas Tackett, and Alexander Cook helped me conceive and develop the dissertation. Kevin O’Brien and Thomas Laqueur offered invaluable suggestions on the final draft. My advisor, Wen-hsin Yeh, read multiple drafts of the dissertation chapters throughout the years. My fellow graduate students generously read many parts of the dissertation. I believe that they suffered quite a bit from going through my poorly edited drafts. My dissertation also benefited from various questions and comments that I received at conferences and workshops all over the world. I am very grateful for every push toward making this project better. I wish to include more individual names, but I am running of time. My sincere apologies! I will thank you the next time we meet. I would like to acknowledge the following agencies for supporting my work. I conducted archival research in China, Taiwan, the U.S., and the U.K. with the support from the Fulbright IIE Commission, the Association of Asian Studies, the Taiwan’s National Library Research Grant, and multiple grants from the University of California at Berkeley. In Taiwan, I accessed the Academia Historica (Guoshiguan) and Academia Sinica (Zhongyang yanjiuyuan) in 2014. I made use of the following archives in China from 2014 to 2015: the Beijing Municipal Archives, the Chongqing Municipal Archives, the Guangdong Provincial Archives, the Guangzhou Municipal Archives, the Jiangsu Provincial Archives, the Nanjing Municipal Archives, the Second Historical Archives, and the Shanghai Municipal Archives. I also used documents from the British Library and the British National Archives. In the U.S., I made use of the East Asian Library at University of California, Berkeley, the Hoover Institution, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives and Records Administration. The staff members at the archives and libraries were always helpful and tried their best to accommodate my requests for documents. After two years of research, I was able to complete my dissertation with writing grants from the University of California, Berkeley and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. My family has been incredibly patient with my long endeavor in academia. I want to especially thank Ben for reading and rereading my chapters, for listening to me thinking out loud at all hours, and for holding down the fort whenever I went on extended research trips. iii Notes on Archival Sources Academia Historica, Taipei & Xindian (AH) Institute of Modern History Archives, Academia Sinica, Taipei (AS) Australia War Memorial Collection (AWM) Beijing Municipal Archives (BMA) British Library, London (BL) British National Archives, Kew (BNA) Chongqing Municipal Archives (CMA) East Asian Library, Berkeley (EAL) Hoover Institution, Stanford (HI) Gansu Provincial Archives (GSPA) Guangdong Provincial Archives (GPA) Guangzhou Municipal Archives (GMA) Jiangsu Provincial Archives, Nanjing (JPA) Library of Congress, Washington DC (LOC) National Library, Beijing (NLC) National Central Library, Taipei (NCL) Nanjing Library, Nanjing (NL) Nanjing Municipal Archives, Nanjing (NMA) National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland (NARA) Second Historical Archives, Nanjing (SHA) Shanghai Library, Shanghai (SL) Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai (SMA) iv List of Figures Fig. 2-1: Age Distribution Fig. 2-2: Birth Provinces of Martyrs Fig. 2-3: Total Character Counts Fig. 2-4: Age of Death and Number of Characters Fig. 2-5: Statistics from Guangzhou and Fujian Fig. 3-1: Front View of the Seventy-Two Yellow Flower Hill Martyrs’ Tomb Fig. 3-2: Incense Burner with Buddhist Swastika (Yellow Flower Hill Martyrs’ Tomb). Fig. 3-3: Iron-cast Skulls along the Spirit Way Fig. 3-4: Outline of Public Cemetery for National Revolutionary Army Fallen Officers and Soldiers Fig. 3-5: New Citizen Committee’s Training and Practicing Farming (Temple of Agriculture) Fig. 3-6: Commemorative Activities in March Fig. 3-7: Template for Spirit Tablets Fig. 4-1: Numbers of the Dead and Injured, and of Gratuity Recipients during the First Round of Dispensing Stipends Fig. 4-2: Numbers of the Dead and Injured, and of Gratuity Recipients during Three Rounds of Dispensing Stipends Fig. 4-3: Survey Form for Fallen Officers and Soldiers of the National Revolutionary Army Fig. 4-4: Sequence of Relatives Eligible to Receive Death Gratuities (National Revolutionary Army, 1927). Fig. 4-5: Sequence of Relatives Eligible to Receive Death Gratuities (Male Government Officials, 1927). Fig. 4-6: Sequence of Relatives Eligible to Receive Death Gratuities
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