Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the Fifteen-year War was presented in the PRC's museums, and which facets of the Fifteen-year War were specifically favoured, and the kind of memories of the war which were popularised in mainland China, by the CCP regime from 1949 to 1982.

Paper long abstract:

Research on the evolution of the PRC's Fifteen-year War remembrance is a relatively new genre. Most of this research gives much greater weight to the era after the 1982 Textbook Incident, which is considered as the first large-scale diplomatic conflict between China and Japan over the wartime history and deals with the period before that merely as a 'preface'. Thus, inevitably, this research's examination on the pre-1982 period was insufficient. One of its insufficiencies is that some important spheres of the Fifteen-year War memory - i.e. literature, music, school textbooks and museums - have not been examined thoroughly enough.

The first aim of this paper, thus, is to provide a close-up study on one such realms: it will explore how the Fifteen-year War was presented in the PRC's museums, and how the presentation of the war in this realm changed or stayed intact between 1949 and 1982. Moreover, this paper also aims to explore which facets of the Fifteen-year War were specifically favoured, and the kind of memories of the war which were popularised in mainland China, by the CCP regime from 1949 to 1982.

It also aspires to challenge a well-established 'myth' that the atrocities perpetrated by Japan during the Fifteen-year War were deliberately omitted by the CCP from the public discourse before 1982. Through its examination of the presentation of the Fifteen-year War in the PRC's museums, this paper finds out that the tragic side of the war was in fact widely portrayed in pre-1982 PRC.