Rana Mitter has been researching and teaching about China's Second World War for well over two decades now. Much of that research was synthesized in his 2013 history China's War with Japan, 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival (Penguin, 2013). Director of the China Centre at Oxford, Mitter is not just a historian; he is also a public intellectual. Mitter has been a regular presenter on BBC radio, and has narrated the documentary “WWII: China's Forgotten War,” educating the British and broader English-speaking publics about a China theatre of the War that is understandably less well known in the West than its European and Pacific theatres.
In China's Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism, Mitter turns his attention to how the War lives on in China's domestic and international politics today. The first full-length monograph on how Chinese remember the War, it focuses on the last 45 years after Mao, with chapters on histories of the war in the 1980s and ‘90s, as well as how the War has been narrated in Chinese museums, TV and films. It also includes chapters on tensions between regional Chongqing and Yan'an memories of the War, and the role of narratives of the War in China's international relations today.
The broad thesis of the book is that evolving Chinese narratives about the War are tied up with changing Chinese identities and political goals in the present. Mitter uses the metaphor of “circuits” of memory to describe how regional and national histories of the war operate across both time and place (both domestically and internationally).
Regional Chongqing histories, for instance, have allowed the Republican experience of the War to begin to be heard in Mainland China, against a Yan'an circuit that largely silenced it under Mao. The Chinese theatre of the War was not just a guerilla war led by Mao's CCP. Millions of Chinese fought, suffered and starved in Nationalist-controlled areas of China. While much of this narrative shift was driven by a political desire for reunification with Taiwan, especially during Ma Ying-jeou's two presidencies (2008–2016), it has also had the effect of allowing Mainland Chinese from that area of the conflict to begin to more openly remember and heal.
Mitter is also interested in how Chinese “circuits” of memory intersect with other national circuits, in particular Western narratives of the War as a defence of Liberty against Fascism. A recurring theme in the book is Chinese frustration that Chinese memories of the War do not resonate in the West, undermining its ability to bolster Chinese soft power.
Mitter argues that the War as narrated in China is “good” in the sense that it seeks to construct an international image of China today as not just strong, but ethical. “Memory work” in China, Mitter argues (p. 214), seeks to “add moral weight” to China's Realist, power-driven foreign policy. “China,” Mitter writes, “wishes to be perceived as a virtuous actor, not just a powerful one” (p. 236).
These arguments are frequently restated, perhaps reflecting how different chapters draw on research conducted over several decades. In one sentence, for instance, “now” appears to refer to 2010 (p. 246).
Mitter writes extremely well, and the book is a pleasure to read. Perhaps reflecting Mitter's two hats as public intellectual/educator and historian, the text can swing between the forest and the trees. Forest sections present basic facts about the Second World War and its memory, addressing a broad readership unfamiliar with China; trees sections present detailed readings of Chinese texts of greater interest to historians and China specialists.
Writing about modern China can be a vexing challenge. To reach a broad audience, we must often simplify things, and this can involve anthropomorphizing “China” as a unitary actor with singular goals, attitudes or feelings (e.g. p. 223). But this can obscure the multiplicity of Chinese voices that animate China's Good War. It can also inadvertently contribute to the essentialization of national and civilizational differences so central to Orientalist and Occidentalist discourses.
And then there is the thorny issue of how to refer to the events of 1989. Mitter writes about the Tiananmen “crisis” (p. 48) and even “confrontation and killings” (p. 84), but never “massacre.” Given his extensive discussion of the “Nanjing Massacre,” this is a notable silence. Given the current politics of the production of knowledge about China, however, it is understandable.
In short, China's Good War has much to offer both the general reader and China specialists. And it is timely. “As China becomes more powerful,” Mitter notes in conclusion, “the world will have to pay more attention to the stories that it wants to tell.” He's right, and his book is a good place to start for those who wish to better understand 21st-century China.
