Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China Available to Purchase

China's century of humiliation was also a century of trauma. Revolutions and wars produced a plethora of violent and untimely deaths in the Republican era. How the Nationalist state builders turned these tragic, premature demises into sacred martyrdoms for party- and nation-building purposes, and the political and social consequences of these commemorative enterprises, is the main subject of Linh D. Vu's monograph Governing the Dead. Vu argues that “the capacity to discipline the tens of millions of war dead—to control their physical and rhetorical presence—was critical to the state-building project in twentieth-century China” (p. 8). Building upon the theoretical premises proposed by Thomas Laqueur, Achille Mbembe, Drew Gilpin Faust, Jay Winter, Maria Rashid, and more, Vu illuminates in great detail the ways in which the new Republican revolutionary memorial apparatus absorbed rituals of popular folk religions and co-opted traditional Confucian values. As she rightly suggests, the Republican state under...