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China's “New Remembering” of the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, 1937–1945*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2007

Parks M. Coble
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Abstract

In today's China, memory of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 is often a front page issue, a source of diplomatic friction between Beijing and Tokyo. Yet in Mao's era, public memory of this conflict virtually disappeared. Only the role of communist forces under Chairman Mao was commemorated; other memories were consigned to historical oblivion. This article examines the process by which memory of the war re-appeared in the reform era. Because the government has emphasized nationalism, the new memory of the war has stressed a patriotic nationalist narrative of heroic resistance. At the same time, a second major theme has been the emphasis on Japanese atrocities, virtually a “numbers game” in historical writing. Thus despite the voluminous publications which have appeared since the 1980s, the new writing on the war has stressed certain themes while neglecting others.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 190 , June 2007 , pp. 394 - 410
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2007

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References

* Earlier versions of this article were delivered at Pomona College in November 2002, at a workshop entitled “Reading and interpreting World War II diaries from Europe and Asia”; at the American Historical Association meeting in January 2003, and at the 18th International Association of Historians of Asia conference in Taipei, Taiwan, December 2004. The author thanks Professor Samuel Yamashita, the Pacific Basin Institute of Pomona College for its support, and the participants in the workshop and conference sessions for suggestions. The author also thanks Chang Jui-te, Charles Hayford, Stephen MacKinnon, Michael Szonyi and Guohe Zheng.