This study analyzes how collective memories of the War of Resistance against Japan are shaped in contemporary China by complex interactions between political power and economic actors. The mnemonic practices we focus on is War of Resistance television dramas produced since 2005. Based on a broad range of empirical data, we investigate how the state and the market cooperate and conflict in the production of such dramas and war memory. We find that the boom of War of Resistance dramas was due to the intersection of the political and economic interests, but that conflicts between the state and the market emerged when the market imperatives motivate drama producers to remake war memory which partly deviates from the official memory. This study contributes to expanding the frontier of the study of the collective memory of the War of Resistance in China and enriching the political economy perspective of memory-making.
