2026/03/13 by Jocelyn Xu · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Japanese History and Culture #Gender, Security, and Conflict #Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration
paper · doi:10.1080/09612025.2026.2644004
openalex publication_date 2026/03/13 · openalex created_date 2026/03/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
This article examines the Shoah Foundation's New Dimensions in Testimony (NDT) project, which interviews and records the memories of Holocaust and other wartime survivors to create their interactive digital representations. Specifically, this article focuses on two Chinese women. One participant, Xia Shuqin, a survivor of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, witnessed the death of her family. The other participant, Peng Zhuying, is the only Chinese survivor of the military sexual violence system, also known as the comfort women system, who was healthy enough to be interviewed. The article analyses how Chinese institutions collaborate with the Shoah Foundation and Chinese Americans to preserve narratives of Anti-Japanese War memory from Chinese survivors to transnational audiences. It argues that NDT projects are necessary and meaningful. The testimonies of Xia Shuqin and Peng Zhuying represent Chinese survivors' perspectives on the Anti-Japanese War. However, essentialising subjects as generic ‘war survivors' risks neglecting the gendered dimensions of wartime experience and life after war. Accordingly, this article contends that interactive digital testimony systems employing large language models distort the expression and preservation of survivors' memories because they lack a feminist methodology. This omission is rooted in the NDT project’s oversight of gendered memory and feminist historiography.