Remembering, Propaganda, Hope and Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of the Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial

ABSTRACT

After the catastrophic Wenchuan Earthquake occurred in Sichuan, China in May 2008, a memorial was built to commemorate the disaster. This essay aims to study how the Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial, as a rhetorical space, creates a national image of tenacious rebirth through the rhetorical reconstruction of the trauma. Analysis shows that the memorial selectively remembers the disaster, publicizes the collectivist spirit and the Communist Party’s leadership for their role in disaster relief and reconstruction of the disaster areas, conveys the rhetoric of hope for the people in the disaster areas and the nation, but ignores the controversies surrounding the quality of school buildings and student victims through silence and alternative presentation. As a political carrier and a tool for educating visitors, the memorial has become a politicized space and transformed from a natural historical site to a political memory space, thus realizing the penetration of politics into people’s daily life.

KEYWORDS:

• Forgetting
• hope
• propaganda
• remembering
• rhetorical analysis
• Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Jacqueline Rhodes and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this essay. We are also grateful for editorial assistant Ms. Rebecca Conklin’s proofreading of the final version of the essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).