Abstract
China keeps reinventing the way it tells its history and its role in World War II. Academic and author
A memorial opened at the top of Songshan mountain in Linglong county in Yunnan province, southwest China, in September last year. The memorial consists of 402 statues of Chinese soldiers who fought the Japanese as part of an expeditionary force during WWII and has been established with the full backing of the Chinese Communist Party. But one element of the exhibit would be profoundly troubling to Chairman Mao, were he alive to see it. The soldiers who are being commemorated were not part of the Eighth Route or New Fourth Armies, the major communist forces during the conflict. They were part of the Nationalist army, the forces under Mao’s old adversary, Chiang Kai-shek. Just a couple of decades ago, it would have been hard to imagine China’s authoritarian communist government saying anything favourable about their deadly nationalist rivals whom they ultimately defeated in the civil war of 1946-49. Today, the nationalist war effort has become part of China’s wider propaganda strategy against Japan. The story of this strange ideological reversal illustrates a wider point at the heart of China’s struggle to project an idea of itself at home and in Asia today: Chinese propaganda about the meaning of World War II is becoming more, not less, important even as the conflict itself slips out of living memory. Interpretations of wartime history in China have profoundly significant consequences for the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region in the years to come.
Anti-Japanese war propaganda is nothing new in China. In 1937, Japan’s increasingly aggressive incursions into China led to war breaking out between the two nations. By the time the war ended in 1945, some 14 million or more Chinese had been killed, and 100 million had become refugees. During the eight years of war, propaganda was a staple of the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists under Mao Zedong. Newspapers, cartoons, and adaptations of popular plays and operas all contributed to a growing sense of national resistance against invasion.
The war against Japan was quickly followed by a civil war, won by the Communists. During Mao’s years in power, which included the frenzy of the Cultural Revolution, the Japanese continued to be the targets of official propaganda, turning up as foils in revolutionary Peking operas such as Legend of the Red Lantern. But overall, it was class warfare and the prospect of international anti-imperialist revolution that were the primary sources of ideological fuel under Mao. The war against Japan was reduced to a caricature in which the Chinese Communist Party had played the leading role, and no other Chinese or foreign actors had made any significant contribution.
ABOVE: Some 6,830 pairs of cloth shoes are laid on the ground at a square of the Nanjing Massacre Museum in Nanking to commemorate Chinese wartime forced labourers who died in Japan during World War II
Credit: Stringer/Reuters
However, in the 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party radically reinterpreted the meaning of the war in official propaganda. China’s highest leaders decided that they would stress nationalism, not class warfare, as the binding ideological glue that would hold China together. Massive investment was placed in public education about the war, and three major museums were established as part of the change. In the northern city of Shenyang, a museum commemorated the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931; the building is designed to resemble a desk calendar open at 18 September, the day of the invasion. In Nanjing, a museum was built on the site of one of the horrific massacres that marked the Japanese invasion of the city in December 1937. And in Beijing, a new museum opened commemorating the entirety of the war against Japan, defined initially as the eight years of full war between 1937 and 1945, but then extended, as has become commonplace within China itself, from 1931 to 1945 to include the invasion of Manchuria, and subsequent events.
There were many remarkable aspects of this decision. One was the fact that no comprehensive museum of the wartime years had existed at all until that point. But the most notable change in emphasis was the way that the communist regime allowed a partial rehabilitation of their former deadly enemies: the nationalist regime that they had overthrown in the civil war of 1946-49. Through the Mao era, Chiang Kai-shek was a much more potent and real threat than the Japanese. Chiang was lurking in Taiwan, waiting to recapture the mainland. In contrast, while the Japanese did not recognize China diplomatically, they had extensive contact with China during much of the 1950s and 1960s; no such contacts existed with Taiwan. As late as the 1980s, it was still taboo to mention Chiang Kai-shek in anything but the most hostile terms.
ABOVE: Paramilitary policemen march during a memorial ceremony on the 82nd anniversary of Japan’s invasion of China, at the September 18th History Museum in Shenyang, in September 2013
Credit: Stringer/Reuters
The opening of previously hidden history has been partial and in service of a particular agenda
In the past couple of decades, this situation has changed radically. Travel to Huangshan, for instance, just outside the southwestern city of Chongqing which served as China’s wartime capital from 1937 to 1945. Huangshan was Chiang’s retreat during the years of World War II, from where he saw the fires lighting up the skies of his capital as Japanese incendiary bombs repeatedly set it aflame. In Chiang’s villa, which is preserved as a museum, you see accounts of Chiang’s wartime resistance as a patriot who defended China against the invasion from that ultimate enemy, Japan. The ultimate manifestation of Chiang’s rehabilitation is to be found at his birthplace in Xikou, in Zhejiang province. Walking around the town, you wouldn’t know that Chiang had lost the civil war in 1949 – Chiang kitsch memorabilia can be found everywhere: fans, paperweights, and posters. His old home, which has been set up as yet another museum, is a masterpiece in ideological contortion: in the photographic displays, Chiang is praised for his dedication to anti-Japanese resistance, but there is then a huge blank between 1945 and the late 1960s, when it is stated, rather lamely, that Chiang left for Taiwan (for reasons unnamed). The events illustrated only by an image of a rather benevolent looking Chiang and Madame Chiang, portrayed like any typical retired couple.
The city of Chongqing is one of the most important sites of this new official shaping of historical memory in China. During the era of Mao, it was impossible for the city to recall the moment that had made it a centre of not just Chinese but global attention for some eight years between 1937 and 1945. Any association with the wartime era was simply toxic because of the connections to the Nationalists. But in the past decade or two, the city has been making up for lost time. Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai fell from power in 2012, but during his years in power he had made a point of allowing the city to stress its wartime history to raise its profile in the present day. Wartime sites such as embassies, or the house belonging to the American Commander-in-Chief of the China Theatre, General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, are now open as tourist attractions. War memorials and books commemorate the Nationalist dead as well as the Communist fallen.
The rehabilitation is not by any means complete. Most textbooks in high school will still tend to stress the communist contribution to winning the war over that of the nationalists. Also, there are huge areas of wartime history that still remain immensely hard to discuss. Collaboration with the Japanese is one of the most obvious ones of those. Wang Jingwei, the former Nationalist leader who defected to work with Japan in 1938, is still remembered as a traitor pure and simple, whose motivations deserve little analysis. There is no prospect of Wang Jingwei’s old house being rehabilitated as a shrine.
The new understanding of the nationalist contribution has had some tangible and positive effects. In popular culture, there have been web projects and television programmes, such as the one hosted by popular Chinese television host Cui Weizhou, which have championed the cause of former nationalist soldiers. In 2013, remaining Nationalist veterans were finally given pensions by the state as a token of appreciation for their contribution to the anti-Japanese struggle.
However, the new emphasis on aspects of the Nationalist war effort does not mean a full and frank discussion about the war and its effects on China. The opening of previously hidden history has been partial and in service of a particular agenda: the reshaping of China’s claims in Asia, particularly as they relate to Japan. After a period of relatively calm and cooperative interaction, the past five years or so has seen a heightening of tensions between China and Japan. There are multiple causes for this. Figures on Japan’s right have made repeated claims that Tokyo’s invasion and occupation of much of Asia in the 1930s and 1940s was a war of liberation, a view shared by none of Japan’s neighbours. In addition, both countries are seeking a more assertive role in the Asia-Pacific region. But ultimately, China is much larger and sees itself as returning to its role as a regional hegemon. Also, Japan is, despite many flaws in its public sphere, ultimately a pluralist democracy. China is not, and the Chinese Communist Party has no intention of letting it become one. That means that the interpretation of the war in China in years to come is likely to fit in with an agenda that is shaped by the needs of the Party rather than by historians concerned to explore the historical facts. This includes the new warmth toward the nationalist war record.
Walking around the town, you wouldn’t know that Chiang had lost the civil war in 1949
In the past few months, the importance of the 1937-45 war against Japan in China’s propaganda strategy has been raised significantly. When China declared its Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) in November 2013 in an area that included the disputed islands, one of the most strongly assertive Chinese newspapers, the Global Times, declared that it was Japan that was the “prime target” of the move. The 70th anniversary of the 1943 Cairo Conference was also noted in Chinese news reporting because of the conference communiqué that declared that Japanese possessions in Asia would be returned after the war. This particular element of Chinese history is being used as a means of justifying present-day Chinese claims in the Pacific.
China has a good claim that it was the “forgotten ally” during World War II. In the West, we rarely remember the role that China played: while holding down some 750,000 or more Japanese troops, China suffered 14 million deaths with 100 million of its people becoming refugees. The United States used its huge sacrifices in the region as the basis for creating a regional role there that exists to the present day. But American hegemony comes ultimately through consensus. If Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, or the Philippines really wished to exclude US power from the region, they could do so. Yet China seems unable to calibrate its power in the region to achieve a similar effect, and its message about its wartime sacrifices has more resonance within China than it does externally. There is a very good case that without China’s efforts in holding down the Japanese, Tokyo’s empire in east Asia might have had a much longer life than it actually did. Yet the use of wartime history in China, even though it has reopened the story of the communists’ former nationalist enemies, has yet to give China the propaganda boost that it so clearly hopes for. The story of the Yunnan veterans has finally been heard by their compatriots, but it has not yet managed to persuade the wider world that China has earned the right to greater power in today’s Asia-Pacific.