From Patriotic Youth to Bogus Students and Back Again: The Politics of Wartime History in Postwar China

On the night of December 17 1943, in the midst of the Japanese occupation of China, a group of Chinese students numbering in the low hundreds gathered on the campus of Nanjing’s National Central University for what would become a series of street protests against gambling, prostitution and opium sales. Surging into the fallen capital’s entertainment district, the students chanted slogans supporting the occupation state of Wang Jingwei, disrupted opium sales and clashed with a squad of Japanese gendarmes. Their bold act of defiance electrified the city, with occupation state authorities working to co-opt the students into their own jurisdictional struggles with the Japanese. Drawing on memoir literature and official histories, this paper investigates the factors behind the shifting treatment and historical commemoration of these activists in the postwar era. Initially derided by the Nationalists and subjected to an indoctrination program for “bogus” students due to their education under the Wang regime, the students faced continued discrimination under the People’s Republic, which similarly viewed them with suspicion and hostility. It was not until 1998 that the students were restored to respectability via a moving tribute from one of their own, former protestor-turned-President Jiang Zemin, who lauded them as patriots guided by underground Communist operatives. By contextualizing these developments within the field of research on the Japanese occupation and China’s post-Tiananmen Patriotic Education campaign, this paper suggests that the return to prominence of the student protestors represents not an expanded openness or freedom for research, but is instead a renewed effort on the part of the state to co-opt the history of the war for its own purposes. This study contributes to the history of protest movements and wartime occupation on the one hand, and the struggle between grassroots activism and state-led narratives in the writing of history on the other.