This
claim sounds particularly hollow in China and Korea, which suffered
horrifically from Imperial Japan’s invasion and occupation of much of
Asia. Yet there has always been a jarring element in official Chinese
protests against the Yasukuni Shrine visits. Such visits are condemned
as insensitive to the feelings of the Chinese people. But, just as
Japanese conservatives are rightly taken to task for refusing to
acknowledge the horrors of their country’s colonialist past, so China
would do well to expand discussion of its own wartime history at home.
For
many decades, under Mao Zedong, the only acceptable version of China’s
wartime experience was that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
spearheaded the resistance against the Japanese, honing its armies while
preparing one of the world’s most significant social revolutions.
Meanwhile, China’s Nationalist (Kuomintang) government under Chiang
Kai-shek, weakened by incompetence and corruption, did little to oppose
the Japanese.
Yet,
in recent years, research from China itself has shown the enormous
scale and cost of the war against Japan. Fourteen million or more
Chinese were killed from 1937 to 1945, and 80-100 million became
refugees. And the invasion destroyed China’s roads, railways, and
factories.
But
other significant changes also began to occur during that period. As
the bombs fell on China’s wartime Nationalist capital, Chongqing, the
social contract between state and society became more important. The
state demanded more from its people, including conscription and
ever-higher taxes; but the people also began to demand more from their
government, including adequate food provision, hygiene, and medical
care. To understand why the war changed China so profoundly, historians
had to move away from treating the 1937-1945 period as a simple story of
an inevitable Communist victory.
Thus,
in the last two decades, China has started remembering its own war
history anew. It helped that the Chinese government has been keen to
encourage reunification with Taiwan, meaning that a more favorable view
of the Nationalist government has appeared on the mainland. Indeed, in
recent years, the Nationalists’ reputation in the People’s Republic has
been rehabilitated in ways unimaginable just a quarter-century ago.
The
Nationalists did most of the set-piece fighting between 1937 and 1945,
and the stands their armies made at cities such as Changsha and Wuhan
are now commemorated with museums and statues. In Chongqing, monuments
such as Chiang Kai-shek’s old villa at Huangshan have been restored, and
the former leader himself is praised for his contributions to resisting
the Japanese. One of China’s top television hosts, Cui Yongyuan, began a
documentary project on Communist wartime veterans, only to become
distracted by his frequent encounters with Nationalist veterans who had
fought the Japanese, but whose contributions had been airbrushed out of
history after Mao’s victory in 1949.
Of
course, Chinese Communists’ role during the war was very significant.
But they did not operate in a vacuum. And historians have come to
acknowledge that the Nationalist government’s flaws – corruption,
inflation, military weakness – were, in part, a product of its long war
against Japan, which it waged essentially alone between 1937 and the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
I
have been a beneficiary of the new openness. Archives that were
previously restricted or closed have allowed both Chinese and foreign
researchers to gather materials to tell previously forbidden stories. As
a result, I was able to give, for the first time in English, a
comprehensive account of China’s wartime experience that combined the
stories of the Nationalists and Communists who resisted the Japanese, as
well as those of Japan’s local collaborators.
But
many gaps remain in how China tells its war history to its own people.
School textbooks remain simplistic, with the Communist role still the
most prominent and the Nationalist role more of a caricature. Video
games in which Chinese troops mow down Japanese soldiers are very
popular, accounting for a significant share of the massive online
multiplayer gaming sub-culture in China.
In
general, the war against Japan is used to fuel a sense that history
thwarted China’s rightful rise. Of course, the Japanese right’s attempts
to distort the history of the invasion should be condemned, as they are
by many in Japan itself. But China’s leaders and public culture should
not use the revised understanding of the war as a tool to build a new
nationalism.
The
proper use of history in public culture is to nurture a thoughtful and
skeptical attitude toward the complexities of the past. By achieving
this, China could really embarrass any Japanese leader who thinks about
visiting the Yasukuni Shrine.
Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, University of Oxford, and the author, most recently, of China’s War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival (published in North America as Forgotten Ally).
