Mediating a difficult past: third-generation engagement at a marginalised dark heritage site in Datong, China

Focusing on the Datong Coal Mine Mass Grave Memorial Site in China, a memorial to victims of Japanese wartime violence and forced labour, this study brings postmemory and prosthetic memory into dialogue to examine how a marginalised dark heritage site mediates third-generation engagement with a traumatic past without direct lived experience. The analysis draws on 16 semi-structured interviews alongside field observations, informal conversations, and everyday references to the memorial, and treats affective engagement as a central lens for tracing reception. It situates these reception patterns in relation to the memorial’s public framings and wider sociohistorical discursive context, while attending to the material and organisational constraints that condition what the encounter can reliably offer. Findings suggest that the memorial can generate affective proximity and ethical attention, yet what carries beyond the visit is unstable when pre-visit narrative resources are thin and on-site interpretation or access is inconsistent. Highlighting the conditionality and unevenness of third-generation postmemorial engagement in such settings, the study traces the supports and constraints through which engagement may extend beyond the moment of encounter.