Memory in Motion

China’s Korean War memory moves in and out of view, but rarely returns unchanged. This article asks how Chinese popular representations of the Korean War vary as the foreign relationships embedded in the war shift. It develops a configurational account of wartime memory, emphasizing activation, selection, and mediation across state priorities, nationalist repertoires, and media institutions. Drawing on a near-comprehensive corpus of theatrically released Chinese Korean War films, alongside close readings of influential print and screen texts, it traces three periods: canonization, latency, and security revival. Chinese sacrifice and victory endure; the United States remains central, but negative portrayals of US soldiers become less common; solidarity with North Korea recedes; Soviet participation remains largely unmentioned; and China’s intervention is increasingly framed as national defense.

Mediation · Nationalism · Sacrifice · Solidarity · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science) · Victory · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration