‘The more it changes’: state scripting, local mediation, and civic voices in the transformation of China’s disaster memoryscapes

This article examines the transformation of China’s disaster memoryscapes and the memory politics that shape them. Drawing on archives, policy documents, and fieldwork, it offers a diachronic analysis of China’s four major disasters: the 1950s floods, the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, and the 1920 Haiyuan earthquake. We argue that the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake marked a turning point, prompting the proliferation of new memorial museums and ruin parks dedicated to specific disasters. These sites not only provided a model for later commemorative practices but also reconfigured the memorial facilities of earlier disasters. Yet these changes expanded the aesthetic and strategic repertoire of commemoration without fundamentally altering the underlying power structure. State scripting, operating through overlapping mechanisms of policy authorization, funding control, and spatial regulation, has remained the structuring force of China’s disaster commemoration. Emerging civic voices and acts of local mediation have introduced complexity and, at times, challenged official narratives, but these interventions remain constrained by state scripting. In tracing this dynamic, this study contributes to cultural policy debates about how states govern public memory of disasters, how local agency operates within national frameworks, and how commemorative governance shapes public affect and state legitimacy.