1Jacqueline Zhenru Lin is Assistant Professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Making National Heroes: The Exemplarist Production of Masculinities in Contemporary China is her first book, based on a doctoral dissertation she defended at Cambridge in 2021. Making National Heroes relies on fieldwork conducted in several provinces of China (mainly Hunan) from 2013 to 2019. The author worked alongside activists aiming to honour dead or living soldiers of the National Army (guojun 國軍) who fought in the War of Resistance against Japan. This “redress movement,” as Lin calls it, was first born in the 1990s as a reaction against the symbolic and material marginalisation of these veterans, whose contribution to “China’s good war” (Mitter 2020) was erased due to their loyalty to the Kuomintang (KMT) during the Chinese Civil War. Its activists try to locate survivors and raise public awareness of their plight, repatriate their remains, perform commemorative rituals, and more generally rehabilitate the memory of these forgotten “national heroes.” When Lin studied the redress movement, it was undergoing both professionalisation (with an NGO, the Unicorn Foundation or UF, centralising most activities after 2011) and digitisation (the UF was particularly active on social media for fundraising, organising online events, etc.).
2The first chapter of the book narrates efforts to repatriate the remains of KMT war dead from Burma, first carried out by individual activists in Yunnan, then taken up by Zhang Xiaobo and his UF. Chapter Two deals with “relative-seeking missions” to Taiwan organised by the UF for relatives of KMT veterans who fled to the island in 1949. Chapter Three provides a portrait of three figures of the redress movement, two men and one woman, and of the sexualised values of masculinity and femininity they embody. Chapter Four explores the complex position of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) veterans active in the UF, while Chapter Five demonstrates the central, yet marginalised, status of women in the redress movement. Lastly, Chapter Six questions gendered relations within the organisation.
3As this outline suggests, Lin places the redress movement in a specific light: her main goal is to study the “craze for male heroism,” particularly the “exemplarist production of masculinities” (p. 3-4), not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up: KMT veterans are presented first and foremost as screens on which activists and ordinary citizens, male and female, project their norms, hopes, and fantasies of what a real man should be, more or less independently of what male role models the Party-state promotes.
4The question is undoubtedly important, and illuminating for some parts of Lin’s inquiry – such as the gendered imagination of Taiwan-Mainland relations among online “patriots,” or the sexual virtues that activists want to see embodied by KMT veterans. However, one cannot shed the feeling that this angle is often artificially forced on material that would have yielded more insights had it been subjected to a more open set of questions. The reader is left wondering whether Chinese society was particularly thirsty for “male heroism” in the 2010s, as opposed to previous time periods, or whether the grassroots rehabilitation of KMT veterans, a highly singular group in political terms, should be a particularly good vantage point for observing the production of Chinese masculinities in general. The lens through which Lin chooses to look at her data sometimes obscures as much as it reveals. For instance, the book strangely neglects the importance of class imaginaries in the making of alternative (non-communist) “national heroes,” despite the fact that scathing criticism of CCP “country bumpkins,” as opposed to elegant KMT officers, is clearly connected to a broader glamorisation of the Republican Era as a lost, bourgeois, China.
5This commitment to a single line of questioning probably has to do with the fact that Making National Heroes is a revised doctoral dissertation, an exercise in which young academics are encouraged to give tokens of loyalty to their subfield (here, feminist cultural anthropology), as well as with the collection this work is published in (Transnational Asian Masculinities). This also accounts for stylistic choices that make the book a difficult read overall, such as the marshalling of many references in support of relatively straightforward claims (do we really need a reference to “emerging post-structural feminist studies on masculinity” on page 84 to understand why socially marginalised PLA veterans would feel solidarity with mistreated KMT veterans?), or sometimes convoluted prose (the book “conceptualises the alliances among multiple hegemonic masculinities in institutional formations, which stabilise and reproduce patriarchal systems in different domains in contemporary China,” as stated on page 6). The best passages are usually the most concrete, where the author’s talent as an ethnographer is on full display. Lin offers striking passages about the awkward position of PLA veterans in the UF, the surreal mobilisation of a Taipei influencer in a relative-seeking mission in Taiwan, or rampant sexism and harassment within the UF – in a final chapter that has the additional merit of offering fascinating insights about the inner workings of the organisation and its social composition, albeit late in the outline of the book.
6The state, however, is eerily absent. Although Lin duly notes that the bottom-up “redress movement” does not happen in a vacuum, but in a complex interaction with the authorities, she offers little information on the changing official treatment of former KMT soldiers and state-NGO relations, both of which evolved rapidly during her fieldwork, which coincided with the consolidation of Xi Jinping’s rule. In some way, this can be construed as a book about the danger faced by an authoritarian regime born of civil war in trying to rehabilitate some of its former enemies: some of the activists seized this opportunity to outdo the Party-state in this process, sometimes expressing a surprisingly outspoken dislike for the CCP. Paradoxically, though, Lin’s focus on masculinity leads her to downplay the most explicitly political implications of her subject (which, however, she does address in a stimulating article published in Memory Studies in 2021). This could be deliberate: tackling such a question head-on may be unwise for a Chinese scholar in the current context. Still, one cannot help but regret that an obviously gifted researcher should publish a book often best read against the grain.