Abstract: The millions of Chinese people who had the misfortune of living through the War of Resistance Against Japan (hereinafter ‘the War’) experienced nearly unbearable trauma and pain. Such vivid and massively shared suffering and injustice, however, remained ultimately private and individual. For many years after the building of the People’s Republic of China, this suffering seldom found its way into the public sphere of expression. A chief goal of this paper is to delve into this curious phenomenon – namely, the ‘absence’ of a collective trauma of the War despite the human suffering – and seek to explain it from a cultural sociological point of view. To this end, the theory of cultural trauma is used and the relationship between various cultural structures in the process of trauma formation is explored. The absence of the trauma of the War should not be understood merely as a consequence of political necessity, but should be contextualized and comprehended within the web of meanings woven by powerful cultural structures that predominated in the public sphere at the time. The paper sets out two principal tasks:. first, the successful construction in Mao’s era of a class trauma that sought to form a new collectivity is traced; and, second, how the experience of the War fits or, rather,
‘unfits’ with this grand narrative of ‘class trauma’ is examined. Tracing representation of theWar in the public sphere around the time, it is argued that the emergence of theWar as a collective trauma was effectively ‘inhibited’ by the trauma of class struggle.

Key words: Cultural trauma, memory of war, collective identity, representation