Cross-Strait Online Narratives of the Nanjing Massacre. Memory, Identity and Politics

This poster examines how the Nanjing Massacre is represented and contested in Chinese-language discussions on Reddit, a platform where mainland-oriented and Taiwan-oriented users meet in the same threads. Drawing on Social Representations Theory and collective memory research, the study analyses 70 threads from 10 subreddits (2019–2025), comprising 1,290 comments. Contributions in simplified and traditional Chinese were coded along eight dimensions and compared statistically, and connected exchanges were interpreted hermeneutically. Most contributions treat the occurrence of the massacre as settled. Simplified- and traditional-script contributions differ mainly in their positions towards remembrance and its political uses, rather than in their acknowledgement of the event. Obstructed exchanges show recurring patterns of discommunication along epistemic, moral–affective and identificational dimensions. The findings suggest that cross-strait memory conflict concerns less what happened than what remembrance requires and who is entitled to organise it.