Friday, December 03, 2021


“China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism” by Rana Mitter
 
China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism, Rana Mitter (Harvard University Press, September 2020)

In 1985, Studs Terkel won a Pulitzer Prize for The Good War, an oral history of World War II. Oxford professor Rana Mitter, director through 2020 of the University’s China Centre, has done well to choose a title for his book that pings Terkel’s massively influential work.

In the countries that called themselves the Allies from 1939-1945, WWII has almost always and everywhere been considered a “good war”. But leveraging not just the title of Terkel’s work, Mitter notes that

Terkel’s use of [good] was layered with irony, since the war had been devastating for so many Americans, and the ‘goodness’ of its overall narrative stood in sharp contrast to the Vietnam war that had followed just two decades later.

In the United States, media properties like The Greatest Generation and Band of Brothers continue a 70-year tradition of reinforcing the “good war” narrative, but the concept of WWII as a “good” war came much later to China, and in his latest historical tour de force, Mitter seeks to describe how “the idea of China’s Second World War as a ‘good war’ became widespread,” starting in the 1990s. Another goal: to describe why that transition in memory, some of it official (and officially engineered), is so tectonically important—not just for China, but for the world.

What is this transition, and why has it happened? In his introduction, Mitter writes:

During the Mao era, class identity was central to China’s self-definition; under Deng Xiaoping, class distinctions were blurred with the restoration of capitalism. A new form of non-class-based national identity was needed. World War II, with its message of shared anti-Japanese struggle across class lines, proved to be a powerful vehicle for that new nationalism.

Not only across class lines, but across battle lines. Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists (the Guomindang, commonly abbreviated KMT) were the primary opponents of the Japanese military expansion into China that started in the late 1920s, and became a full-scale invasion in 1937. Yet for decades, recognition of the KMT role in “China’s good war” had been all but forbidden outright. Chiang famously described the Japanese as a “disease of the skin”, but the Communists as a “disease of the heart”, and the CCP leadership felt similarly about their eventually defeated KMT nemesis. Mao Zedong famously opined that the CCP should thank the Japanese, because without their invasion, the CCP would not have prevailed to the extent that its leaders could sit in Beijing and enjoy the city’s famous, eponymous opera performances.

In Mitter’s chapter named “History Wars: How Historical Research Shaped China’s Politics”, he quotes “a depth charge under the CCP’s traditional historiography of the war years”, placed there by an essay in the mainland academic journal Republican Archives (Minguo Dang’an) in 1987.

Of course, looked at with today’s eyes, the history of the war of resistance written in the thirty years since the foundation of the PRC is clearly inadequate and has serious flaws. First, the research was too narrow…

In “Old Memories, New Media”, Mitter traces the changing nature, and content, of bloggers and other denizens of China’s social media, and of course the rapid growth of the anti-Imperial Japan movie genre. This transition has proven a challenge. In 2019, The Eight Hundred, an epic drama about an iconic defense by the Chinese during the 1937 Battle of Shanghai (August to November 1937), was scheduled to debut at the Shanghai International Film Festival. The Festival cancelled the showing, and The Eight Hundred was later released only after some further “editing”, because of a robust dispute about how to portray the KMT soldiers and flag.

The Chinese Red Culture Association, linked to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, had condemned the film, arguing that it gave far too rosy a view of the Nationalist government’s contribution to the war. The group was outraged over scenes such as one in which the Chinese soldiers defend the Chinese Nationalist flag with its distinctive white star and blue background.

There were no overtly Communist troops in the 1937 battle, indeed there were few anywhere, one year after the end of the Long March, which retreat had decimated (literally) the Communist forces. And no hammer-and-sickle flag.

Part of creating a “good war” narrative within China requires rehabilitation of the KMT, part requires changing the enemy from Chinese of other class backgrounds to Imperial Japan. Each component is fraught. Regarding the ongoing challenge of integrating the KMT into the “good war” narrative, Mitter writes:

Still today, the CCP is in a position where it is making several conflicting arguments simultaneously: that (by implication) the Nationalist state was legitimate and sovereign, presumably up to 1949, even though the civil war was based on the premise that it was not … The state has still not found the right balance to enable it to use but also control the memory of the Nationalists.

And as for an evolving relationship with Japan,

Yet at some level, the dispute between these two countries is not best understood as a conflict between China and Japan. Rather, it stems from a continuing debate within China about the nature of Chinese identity… many of the gestures that observers and external bodies suggest for bringing about Sino-Japanese reconciliation, whether further apologies from Japan or the writing of joint textbooks, are unlikely to bring about a final resolution to the issue. These are rationalist responses to what is an emotional and ideological phenomenon.

Moreover, the CCP’s “good war” initiative is not, indeed cannot be, merely domestic. In his penultimate chapter, “The Cairo Syndrome: World War II and China’s Contemporary International Relations”, Mitter points out that

China’s international relations have been significantly shaped by its attempt to change the collective memory of the war, particularly in the twenty-first century.

He quotes from a Xi Jinping speech in 2015:

The goal is to reconsider the great path of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance and confirm the great contribution that the war of resistance made to the victory in the world antifascist war…We must encourage international society accurately to recognize the position and role in the world antifascist war of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance.

There’s no shortage of justification for official China’s claim to moral legitimacy for the country’s sacrifices during the War of Resistance. Well north of 10 million Chinese died unnatural deaths between 1937 and 1945, most of them civilians murdered by the Imperial Japanese Army. And the continent tied down more than half a million Japanese troops during those years. In the introduction, Mitter writes,


If the United States could gain decades of dominance on the back of its wartime contributions to Asia, Chinese analysts argue today, so should China…

and that China “is keen for its growing presence in the world to be seen as one of normative and moral leadership, rather than leadership defined solely by economic and military weight.”

Regardless of the theoretical merit of that argument, it may not matter much—at least so far. Several years ago, a consortium of Chinese and Hollywood folks set out to make a blockbuster about Imperial Japan’s 1938-1943 bombing of China’s wartime capital, Chongqing. Titled The Bombing, the film attracted Bruce Willis as leading man and Mel Gibson as art director. Mitter quotes from Showbiz, an industry publication, in 2016:

… we may never see The Bombing. It’s a bomb … It’s about the Chinese fighting back against the Japanese in World War II … It’s not like a lot of people around the world care about that.

Official China may aim for the “good war” repurposing to enhance their moral as well as realpolitik stature, but it will surely be an uphill, er, battle to gain even the attention of the G-7 on this point, let alone their appreciation.

But habitual lack of awareness or appreciation from the rest of the world may matter less and less. China’s increasing assertion of its moral legitimacy may be harder and harder to ignore. In his conclusion, Mitter suggests why official China’s repurposing of the memory of the war years is so important today—and tomorrow—and therefore suggests why his book about that strategy is so timely and valuable. In the final two sentences of China’s Good War, Mitter writes:

As China becomes more powerful, the world will have to pay more attention to the stories that it wants to tell. Whether we realize it or not, we are all living in China’s long postwar.

Van Fleet’s first book, Tales of Old Tokyo, a scrapbook history of the city from 1853 to 1964, was published in 2015. Resident in Japan for the decade of the 1990s, Van Fleet has lived in China since. He is steadily producing episodes of his multimedia project, Quarreling Cousins: China and Japan from Antiquity to the 2020s. He serves as Director, Corporate Globalization, at the Antai College of Economics & Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

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