Chinas Good War

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year Chinese leaders once tried to suppress memories of their nations brutal experience during World War II. Now they celebrate the victorya key foundation of Chinas rising nationalism. For most of its history, the Peoples Republic of China limited public discussion of the war against Japan. It was an experience of victimizationand one that saw Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek fighting for the same goals. But now, as China grows more powerful, the meaning of the war is changing. Rana Mitter argues that Chinas reassessment of the World War II years is central to its newfound confidence abroad and to mounting nationalism at home. Chinas Good War begins with the academics who shepherded the once-taboo subject into wider discourse. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, they researched the Guomindang war effort, collaboration with the Japanese, and Chinas role in forming the post-1945 global order. But interest in the war would not stay confined to scholarly journals. Today public sites of memoryincluding museums, movies and television shows, street art, popular writing, and social mediadefine the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China. Wartime China emerges as victor rather than victim. The shifting story has nurtured a number of new views. One rehabilitates Chiang Kai-sheks war efforts, minimizing the bloody conflicts between him and Mao and aiming to heal the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. Another narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order that emerged from the waran order, China argues, under threat today largely from the United States. Chinas radical reassessment of its collective memory of the war has created a new foundation for a people destined to shape the world.