Anniversary journalism in China: Mediated memories of the Second World War

The concept of prospective memory has been suggested as a way of theorising the importance of forward-looking memory in mediated accounts of past events. As yet, however, there was insufficient work to analyse the relationship between retrospective and prospective memory especially in collaborative journalistic cultures where one might expect the importance of prospective memory to be significant. Here, we apply the concept of mediated prospective memory, together with retrospective memory, to understand the commemoration of the end of the Second World War in China. We compare the commemoration—or indeed the absence of commemoration—in the People’s Daily over the last seven decades, showing how the Second World War was retrospectively remembered, which remaining geopolitical or domestic tasks the Chinese people were reminded of prospectively, and how retrospective memory has been reinterpreted over time in order to construct a narrative suiting the perceived changing needs of the future. Through doing so we contribute methodological and conceptual resources for the analysis of the relationship between retrospective and prospective mediated memory and commemorative journalism beyond China.