By AUSTIN RAMZY
JULY 10, 2014
A visitor photographed the Marco Polo Bridge on the western outskirts of Beijing on July 7, the 77th anniversary of the skirmish that triggered full-scale war between Japan and China.Credit Wang Zhao/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke at an event in Beijing on Monday commemorating the 77th anniversary of the start of full-scale war with Japan, he warned against efforts to downplay Japan’s brutal occupation of China. It was a stark reminder of how the events of that era continue to shape the geopolitics of Asia today, as China and Japan square off over territorial disputes and Beijing voices concern about Japan’s moves to lift longstanding restrictionson its military forces.
Rana Mitter, professor of the history and politics of modern China at Oxford.Credit Courtesy of Rana Mitter
In his recent book “Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II” (outside the United States, it is titled “China’s War with Japan, 1937-1945″), Rana Mitter, a professor of history at the University of Oxford, restores the often tarnished image of China’s contribution to the defeat of Japan in World War II. In an interview, he said that, unlike in Europe, where a broad consensus on the war has been achieved, interpretations of the conflict in Asia remain a source of acrimony between the major players, and these disagreements have important ramifications for the future of the region. A better understanding of history by all sides, he said, will prevent the events of the past from being used in an irresponsible manner. Following are excerpts:
Q. East Asia has had these sorts of debates over World War II history in the past. Does this latest bout feel different in any way?
A. I think it is new and I think it’s different.
In some sense it’s a continuation of disputes that have been going on for a long time. If you think back to the 1980s, when we had the so-called “textbook dispute” in which various Japanese textbooks which were felt to be whitewashing Japanese war crimes in China were condemned by the Chinese government — some people regard that as being the beginning of the contemporary phenomenon of this kind of dispute over history between China and Japan.
But I do think what we’ve been seeing over the past few weeks and months is new. There are two reasons for that. The first is that, in terms of the politics of the two countries, the history dispute is fitting into two very different views of themselves. In China we’re talking about a new administration under Xi Jinping which has explicitly stated that using the memory of the war against Japan, the War of Resistance against Japan as it’s known in China, is a core ideological plank in terms of shaping a new identity. And that fits alongside the new geopolitical aims that China has, which again are not particularly hidden, which is to increase its level of influence in the Asia-Pacific region. It’s a different sort of China that’s now talking about these issues.
Japan also, of course, is in a different place, in part in reaction to what’s going on in China. The obvious sign of that is the [Prime Minister Shinzo] Abe Cabinet and its attempts to change the Constitution on questions of the Self-Defense Force and how it’s used. It also speaks, if one looks at opinion polls in Japan, to by no means an absolute but by some means a partial shift in some parts of public opinion which are becoming more hostile to China. So the disputes over World War II and that period are figuring into a very different sort of geopolitical East Asia.
Q. When Xi Jinping and other Chinese officials discuss Japan and World War II, who is their intended audience?
A. Speeches like the one we heard a couple days ago are, I think, very much aimed at two separate audiences. The first one is very much domestic. This is an attempt to create in the Chinese public sphere an entirely new understanding of the war, its effects on China and why China should act in certain ways today. I would say very briefly that the overall message is: We were vulnerable back then. We suffered one of the most devastating events in our country’s history. This must never be allowed to happen again.
On the international side, I think that there is a particular message that’s becoming clearer and clearer. That was one of the reasons the American title of my recent book about World War II in China is “Forgotten Ally,” because I think basically it’s becoming more clear the Chinese are becoming more aware of their own history, their own contributions during World War II to the Allied victory that would include at least 14 million dead, 80 to 100 million Chinese becoming refugees during that period, the smashing apart of the modernization that had been happening in a rather tentative way in China in terms of building roads, railways and so forth, all of that sacrifice to oppose the Japanese.
Until recently, that’s been a very inward-looking story in China. In recent years China has been much keener to use the story in an international perspective. The message goes something like this: Why is the U.S. still in the Asia Pacific, 70 years after the end of the war? At one level it made supreme sacrifices and contributions to the Allied victory in 1945, and as a result it got to reshape the Asia-Pacific world.
China now says, well, China was also one of the Allied powers. It also made a very significant contribution to the Allied victory. Had it not been for the Chinese contribution, three-quarters of a million Japanese troops at their peak would not have been held down in a quagmire. They could have been redeployed elsewhere. So China really was quite central to the ultimate Allied victory, but what benefits has China reaped from making this supreme contribution?
Now again, there’s an element of willful sleight of hand here, because of course one of the major reasons that China never reaped the benefit was because the Nationalist government that had fought the war primarily alongside the Communists was thrown out of power in the civil war, and of course Mao’s Communists were never going to acknowledge the Nationalist contribution. But the fact is that today, with the partial rehabilitation of the Chinese wartime government even in Communist China, the aim is not by any means about creating a new and objective history, instead it’s about trying to find geopolitical leverage points in the here and now by reading history in a new and selective, but rather more creative, way.
Q.Xi and others seem to be saying that the rest of the world doesn’t appreciate the horrors of what Japan did during the war. Is there any truth to that?
A.Yes. There are two lessons that the Chinese seem more and more keen for the world to draw from the war experience. First is that, I think it is true in the West for the most part, the bare facts of what China went through and also what China contributed to the wartime victory of the Allies simply aren’t understood.
Also the fact that for four-and-a-half years, between 1937 and Pearl Harbor in 1941, China essentially was fighting alone against the Japanese. It’s worth considering the alternative. Had the Chinese surrendered in 1938, which many people expected them to do, you would have had an East Asia that was essentially a Japanese colony or Japanese protectorate for decades to come. There might never have been a world war in Asia at all and the history of the world would be quite different.
You don’t want to push it too far, but I think that it’s very clear that the Chinese contribution to the war was more geopolitically significant than Westerners have come to realize. The Chinese as a whole, not just the authorities but also the public, are right to say that story isn’t well known.
The corollary of that is there is a strong push in today’s China to try and argue that, because the West hasn’t acknowledged that past, it should now make concessions to China in the Asia-Pacific region. That, I think, is a much more tenuous link.
It’s tremendously important to acknowledge the wider reality of what went on in China, to commemorate what China did and to provide that wider historical information to the West as well as to the Chinese themselves. At the same time it’s a very tough call to argue that there is some direct geopolitical debt that has to be paid as a result of events 70 years ago. So I think you have to separate the historical facts and the revelation of those from any particular significance in the present day.
Q.One of the points that Xi made is that anyone who changes history will not be welcomed by China or any of the nations of the world. He seemed to be speaking directly about Japan. Is there an effort in Japan to redefine what happened in the war?
A.I don’t think there’s a fundamental attempt to redefine the war in Japan. One thing I should note is that Japan is a liberal democracy with a wide public sphere. People with all sorts of views — left, right and center — have their own views about the war. There are also radical voices and leftist voices in Japan who make it very clear that Japan committed terrible atrocities in China during the war and that there is no getting around that.
What I think is disturbing is that there is more respectability than there should be in some parts of the public sphere in Japan for a revisionist view of the war. This is a very, very long way from saying there is some huge attempt to whitewash the war in Japan. I don’t think that’s the case at all. But I think it is problematic when we see top political leaders arguing that maybe there is some sort of nuance, some sort of liberatory mission that existed on the part of Japan during the war.
The bottom line is that Japan went to war in China and then more broadly in Asia in 1941 because it was driven by a desire for imperial expansion and to fulfill its own increasingly shrill ideological goals. And I think there are sections of the Japanese public which haven’t done enough to acknowledge that that’s the reality of why Japan went to war.
Q.Part of this history debate is driven by Prime Minister Abe and his efforts to lift some of the postwar constraints on the Japanese military. In China that’s triggered a lot of talk about a return of Japanese militarism. How valid do you think those concerns are?
A.I think they’re not really valid at all. Japan is an utterly different country from what it was in the 1940s. Japan became a militarist country in the 1930s because it had an extremely unstable political system. Its democracy was weak and partial in many ways. It also failed to find many allies in the global community, which drove it further inward. Today the situation is completely changed. Japan’s democracy is stable. It’s often dysfunctional, as many democracies around the world can be. But there’s no question that the system is embedded and solid and there to stay. I don’t think anyone could imagine the Japanese government would not remain a liberal democratic system.
And also the military situation is completely different. Today there exists what did not exist in the 1930s, and makes the absolute crucial difference, which is the presence of a third party, the United States, in the region, which has a very significant defense role. In other words, although Japan has made certain moves, largely I think for domestic political purposes, in the end its defense behavior will still be constrained for a very long time to come by its alliance with the United States. This is a constraint both on Japan and on China. Neither one can act without taking into account what the United States might do.
Q.Why do you think these feelings about the war are so strong in China and South Korea but we don’t hear much about other places that Japan occupied in World War II? You hear a lot about the Rape of Nanking but not about the Rape of Manila or other atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army elsewhere.
A.It depends who the ‘we’ is. If you talk about people in the West, I think it’s fair to say the Asian theater of the war and its significance, and East Asian geopolitics in general, still tend to be a bit remote. It’s very unfortunate, because this area of the world, Asia broadly has 80 percent of the world’s population, economically this is a very important area. So I think understanding the history of how that area got to where it is will become increasingly important in the Western world.
That said, I think it’s also the case that, unlike in the North Atlantic, the aftermath of 1945 in Asia has never given rise to a unified and agreed narrative. In a sense, 1945 in the North Atlantic, despite the Cold War, gave rise to a certain set of things that remain solid — American dominance in the North Atlantic, NATO, the E.U. and a shared history. France and Germany essentially share a consensus on the meaning of the history of that period and it’s very unlikely that will be unpicked.
None of that is really true for the Asia-Pacific region. 1945 is today unfinished business. There has been a set of attempts to recreate geopolitics in the region, starting with that year and thrown way off course by a lot of unexpected events, most notably the Communist victory in China. As a result, the different histories of the different places remain very disparate. The history of the Philippines and its occupation has been of interest to people who work on Southeast Asia, but it doesn’t seem to have much significance elsewhere.
Q.What is it like for you as a historian who has focused on this period 60, 70 years ago to see the topics you’ve researched become headline stories today?
A.It’s very disconcerting in a way. If you’re a historian of World War II in Europe, then although the subject still remains of tremendous interest in schools and the wider public culture, I think most people would suggest it really is the past. I think most people would argue the likelihood of a general conflict in Europe today is pretty unthinkable.
While conflict still seems to me highly unlikely in the Asia-Pacific region, it’s notable that nonetheless events which might have seemed of passing interest to historians working on quite obscure topics do still have tremendous amounts of political significance in China and Japan today.
I think it encourages people to understand and read more of history. When I say people I don’t just mean people of the region, although that would be very good, but also people in the wider world, in the West, to try and understand why things happened as they did. I think that that prevents one of the greatest dangers, which is a superficial understanding of history that produces false analogies. The more history you learn and understand, the less likely it is that history will be used in an irresponsible manner.
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