Published by Harvard's Belknap Press in September, China's Good War is the historian Rana Mitter's first book since Forgotten Ally in 2013. Mitter has spent much of his career studying the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), a regional conflict in East Asia which became intertwined with the Second World War. As in his previous works, Mitter succeeds at making this conflict between China and Japan interesting and relevant for the general international audience.
The thing that distinguishes this book from Mitter's last is its attempt to connect the Second Sino-Japanese War with current narratives in China. It discusses how China's role as one WW2's allied victors, alongside the US, Britain and Russia, should have meant it was "present at the creation" of the resulting international order. In reality, however, Mao's China became a pariah in a world defined by Western values. Unsurprisingly, then, the country's recent leaders have sought to revoke that perceived injustice, reviving the history of a 'good war' that elevated China to major power status.
Mitter – a professor at Oxford and the director of its China Centre – is one of the most well known scholars of this subject alongside the likes of Hans van de Ven, his teacher at Cambridge (and mine, incidentally). He opens by ensuring us of his various credentials in the form of published books, prestigious lectures and media appearances. Mitter also mentions his attendance at the massive military parade which took place in Beijing in 2015 to mark 70 years since the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War.
China's 70th anniversary "V-Day" parade in Beijing, September 2015 (Tencent News).
All of that is no doubt important and impressive. In my view, though, the value that Mitter brings to scholarship of this kind is to come from a position that is informed yet removed. As a veteran academic who is not based in China, he is well placed to offer much-needed counterpoints to the official narratives projected by Beijing, as well as China-based scholars who are inevitably constrained by the country's tightly-controlled intellectual environment.
At the same time, however, Mitter's absence from life and society in China limits his authority to really know the relevance of this "good war", if any, to the country's recent course. The premise that the WW2 story is significant in contemporary Chinese affairs makes total logical sense, yet it is not something that one perceives strongly on a day-to-day basis. At least, this has not been obvious in my own experience of living and working in China for much of the past decade.
Rather, China's involvement in WW2, through its conflict with Japan, is just one of a number of significant historical events that continue to be drawn on in official discourse. Other defining moments include the founding of the PRC in 1949, and the introduction of 'Reform and Opening' in 1978; both events were commemorated in recent years with celebrations akin to the parade that Mitter witnessed in 2015. Next year will again see large-scale festivities to honour another major milestone, the centenary of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
Above all, I feel that China's Good War is affected by a problem of nuance. While it is a commendable pursuit to include China's war with Japan in the story of WW2, an issue arises in referring to WW2 and the Second Sino-Japanese War as being one and the same, as Mitter often seems to do. The reality was that China's mid-century conflict with Japan was in some ways part of WW2, but in other ways an entirely separate event.
To the extent that the Second Sino-Japanese War can be considered a part of WW2, it is as one part of one theatre of WW2. So to suggest then that "WW2" per se is shaping modern-day narratives in China is, I think, slightly misleading. And by merging China's experience of its war with Japan into the wider story of WW2, there is a danger of glossing over important differences and memories of the two conflicts.
Of course, it is not really Mitter who has set out to rewrite this chapter in history, but the Chinese propaganda apparatus. As he points out, China's war with Japan became the best option for Beijing to remake into its 'good war', because it was "not the fault of the Chinese themselves – unlike the many other wars that China endured in the twentieth century." Despite this, the conflict with Japan is still a highly problematic choice for PRC propagandists.
For a start, the war effort was not led by the current ruling CPC, but by the Nationalist Party (KMT) who governed China at the time. As Mitter recalls, this awkward fact meant that the war's history had been neglected during the early decades of the PRC, and even misrepresented as a Communist guerrilla war, until the 1980s. It was only then that Beijing began to restore the Nationalists' contribution, hoping that this would in turn portray China as having been a major player in the global anti-fascist war.
China's Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek with FDR and Churchill at Cairo in 1943.
This reinterpretation, Mitter says, was aimed at projecting China as a leader which was "present at the creation" of the international order that emerged from WW2. But while the CCP may want the world to see China as part of a global fight against fascism, in reality, the Chinese war against Japan was driven by very different priorities and values than the West's WW2.
"During the war itself, ideas of order, rather than of freedom, were central," writes Mitter. Indeed, when China began its war with Japan, it had been beset by problems of social order, political sovereignty and territorial unity. 'Freedom', which became the hallmark of Western WW2 narratives, remained an afterthought in the Chinese consciousness until the subsequent Civil War and 'liberation' in 1949.
Mitter's observation of these conflicting WW2 narratives between China and the Western allies is very valid and relevant to understanding present day tensions. I can't help but feel, then, that his discussion fails to go one step further and connect these contested ideas like 'freedom' and 'fascism' to some of the most important recent events in China. (Forgive me as I now go off on a slight tangent.)
One of those contemporary events is the unrest that has recently rocked Hong Kong. 'Freedom', and its erosion by Beijing, has been the central issue for many anti-government protestors there, armed with slogans like "Keep HK Free!" and "Free Hong Kong, Democracy Now!" Following months of turmoil, Beijing's response has been to impose a strict national security law, an unmistakable victory for 'order' over 'freedom'.
Beyond Hong Kong, it is in another of China's tense border regions where 'freedom' and 'order' have come into conflict. Since 2017, over a million Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang are believed to have been incarcerated in internment camps, known in official doublespeak as "vocational training centres". Leaked evidence has revealed ruthless discipline, torture, forced sterilisation and even gang rape inside the camps, with staff instructed to “never allow escapes” or "abnormal deaths”.
Satellite image of a camp constructed in Xinjiang in 2017.
These "training centres" sound eerily similar to the “Conditioning Centres” of Aldous Huxley's dystopian classic, Brave New World, written in the 1930s amid a rising tide of Fascism in Europe, and on the eve of the first concentration camps operating in Nazi Germany. The horrors of those camps, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, would come to define Western memories of WW2, and the narrative of the war's purpose as a fight for freedom over fascism.
It seems strange, then, that in a book about the legacy of WW2 narratives in contemporary China, Mitter neglects to mention this important common theme, that of mass incarceration. Maybe it is because it is a sensitive topic which he would rather avoid, or because it is too recent for an historian like Mitter to process. Another possibility is that he simply doesn't feel that events in Xinjiang have enough meaningful relevance to WW2 legacies.
I would argue, however, that the very existence of the Xinjiang camps supports one of his main conclusions: that China's WW2 memory is significantly different from that of the other allied powers. Because China did not share in the experience of the Nazi holocaust, it lacks the same sense of moral revulsion towards internment camps that exists in the West. Beijing therefore went ahead with its camps in Xinjiang, misjudging the diplomatic crisis and reputational damage that would result.
Mitter does, to his credit, note how China has misjudged Western attitudes toward the holocaust in other contexts. Yet it is the situations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong that exemplify, more than anything, his point about the persistent dichotomy of 'order' versus 'freedom'. And it is in large part because of that dichotomy that China still struggles to be accepted by the world's other major powers. Rather than view China as an equal partner which was 'present at the creation' of the free world, they still mistrust Beijing as an oppressive successor regime to Cold War-era totalitarianism.
So if Mitter writes another book about WW2 and China, which I suspect he will, it would be interesting to see him discuss some of these apposite recent events. In particular, the contemporary policies in Xinjiang, which have such a clear link to one of the key narratives of WW2. For now, though, China's Good War is an excellent option for anyone wishing to learn more about the Second Sino-Japanese War, and how its legacy lives on in today’s China.
