The politics of remembrance in China: the commemoration and heritagisation of colonial prisons in Qingdao and Dalian

Abstract Heritage is not only a channel to observe or experience history and the past but also a way to remember or forget. In postcolonial China, where government authorities and heritage professionals assume supreme authority in determining what relics of the colonial past should be kept (or not) and how their heritage values should be interpreted to be ‘correctly’ understood by the general public, the colonial prison has been used as a place for invoking the collective memories of the selected part of the colonial past in China. This paper looks at the heritage-making process of the two colonial prison museums in Dalian and Qingdao, with the aim of unpacking the power issues surrounding the heritage making in postcolonial China by investigating how the past associated with colonialisation has been picked, edited, and interpreted by the audience. Today, three colonial prisons remain in China. While all of them have been designated as heritage, the colonial prison in Shanghai still functioned as prison when this research was conducted (Zhou 2024). This research focuses on the decommissioned prisons in Qingdao and Dalian, which have been converted into prison museums. While both museums are interpreted as sites of collective memory that foreground Japan’s invasion of China, they differ significantly in their treatment of European colonialism. Although both silence aspects of European colonialism, this is done for different purposes: the Lvshun Russo-Japanese Prison Museum minimises its Russian colonial past to maintain a dominant narrative centred on Japan’s wartime atrocities, aligning with nationalist priorities, whereas the Qingdao German Prison Museum downplays the darker aspects of German colonialism to support the city’s branding and economic goals. Through a comparative analysis of these two types of prison museums, this paper reveals how the decommissioned prisons are selectively designated as heritage by China’s authorised heritage discourse. This research sheds light on the issues of power in the process of memory construction in postcolonial China. This study elucidates the instrumental role of prison museums in China and further strengthens the notion that heritage is a process of memory and construction.