Rana Mitter

Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Nationalism, History and Memory in the Beijing War of Resistance Museum, 1987–1997

At Wanping, around 50 kilometres from the centre of Beijing, the shots that began the eight-year war between China and Japan were fired in 1937. On the site there now stands the Memorial Museum of the Chinese Peoples War of Resistance to Japan (the museums own translation of its title, Zhongguo renmin kang-Ri zhanzheng jinianguan) . Inside, a wide array of materials is displayed, but among the most prominent are the waxwork diorama reconstructions of Japanese atrocities against the Chinese. One such display shows a Japanese scientist in a white coat, intent on carrying out a gruesome bacteriological warfare experiment, plunging his scalpel into the living, trussed-up body of a Chinese peasant resistance fighter. But just in case this is not enough to drive the message home, the museum designers have added a refinement: a motor inside the waxwork of the peasant, which makes his body twitch jerkily as if in response to the scalpel, an unending series of little movements until the switch is turned off at closing time.

Across the Blocs : Exploring Comparative Cold War Cultural and Social History

1. East is East and West is West?: Towards a comparative sociocultural history of the Cold War 2. The Man Who Invented Truth: The tenure of Edward R. Murrow as director of the United States Information Agency during the Kennedy years 3. Soviet Cinema in the Early Cold War 4. Future Perfect?: Communist science fiction in the Cold War 5. The Education of Dissent: Radio free Europe and Hungarian society, 1951-56 6. The Debate over Nuclear Refuge 7. Some Writers Are More Equal Than Others: George Orwell, the state and Cold War propaganda

China in World War II, 1937–1945: Experience, Memory, and Legacy *

Chinas long war against Japan from 1937 to 1945 has remained in the shadows of historiography until recently, both in China and abroad. In recent years, the opening of archives and a widening of the opportunity to discuss the more controversial aspects of the wartime period in China itself have restored World War II in China (‘the War of Resistance to Japan’) to a much more central place in historical interpretation. Among the areas that this issue covers are the new socio-political history of the war that seeks to restore rationality to the policies of the Guomindang (Nationalist) party, as well as a new understanding in post-war China of the meaning of the war against Japan in shaping Cold War and post-Cold War politics in China. In doing so, it seeks to make more explicit the link between themes that shaped the experience of World War II in China to the wars legacy in later politics and the uses of memory of the conflict in contemporary Chinese society.

Classifying Citizens in Nationalist China during World War II, 1937–1941

This paper argues that the first phase of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 saw a significant change in the relationship between state and society in China, leading to a greater use of techniques of classification of the citizenry for purposes of welfare provision and mobilization through propaganda, methods until recently more associated with the Communists than with their Nationalist rivals. The paper draws on materials from Sichuan, the key province for wartime resistance, showing that the use of identity cards and welfare provision regulations were part of a process of integrating refugees from occupied China into the wider wartime society, and that propaganda campaigns were deployed to persuade the local indigenous population to support wartime state initiatives. Although Nationalist efforts to mobilize the population in wartime were flawed and partial, they marked a significant change in the conception of Chinese citizenship.

1911: The Unanchored Chinese Revolution *

One hundred years after the 1911 Revolution (Xinhai Revolution) in China, its meaning continues to be highly contested. Paradoxically, the more time that passes, the less certain either political actors or scholars seem to be about the significance of 1911 for the path of Chinese revolutionary history. This essay examines three phenomena: the appropriation of 1911 in contemporary political and popular culture; the use of 1911 as a metaphor for contemporary politics by PRC historians; and the changing meaning of 1911 over the past ten decades, particularly during the years of the war against Japan. The essay concludes that it is precisely the “unanchored” nature of 1911, separated from any one path of historical interpretation, that has kept its meaning simultaneously uncertain and potent.

Maoism in the Cultural Revolution: A Political Religion?

The cult of personality surrounding Mao Zedong peaked during the initial phase of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR, 1966–1969). China’s youth was mobilised behind the Chairman’s call to ‘bombard the headquarters’, and eagerly took part in Mao’s revolt against his own party. The role of the young Red Guards caught not only China but the world’s attention. It seemed that they followed Mao not as a political leader, but rather as a god, ‘the reddest of red suns in all our hearts’. This chapter will examine the case for interpreting this phenomenon in terms of ‘political religion’. It will suggest that there is a strong case for arguing that the irrational and totalistic nature of the mass movement during the GPCR can be interpreted fruitfully as a secular theology. It urges caution, however, in using the term wholesale when considering the elite discourse which initiated the Cultural Revolution, and which did not seek actively to create a secular priesthood and religious community. It also suggests that the religious models most appropriate for comparison are not those of pre-modern China, but rather the European derived religious models which shaped Western political religions, and were well-known and understood by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

WRITING WAR: AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MODERNITY AND WARTIME NARRATIVE IN NATIONALIST CHINA, 1937–1946

The Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 was perhaps the single most destructive event in twentieth-century Chinese history. However, there has been relatively little attention paid to how war was experienced in the Nationalist-controlled area (‘Free China’) under Chiang Kaishek. Two autobiographical texts are examined here, one a sequence of reportage from the early war years by the journalist Du Zhongyuan, and one a biji (notebook) written immediately after the wars end by the social scientist Xu Wancheng. By choosing particular modern or anti-modern genres and styles to write in, the authors expressed a wider sentiment about the wars ambiguous role in modernising China. Dus work hopes to create modernity from destruction; Xus suggests that modern warfare has created chaos.

Picturing victory: the visual imaginary of the War of Resistance, 1937-1947

The Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1947 has not been sufficiently understood as a narrative in its own right, but rather, as a transitional conflict between Nationalist and Communist rule. The examination of the visual imagery of warfare disseminated through newsprint and books is one way to reinterpret the history of this period. Through a close reading of images printed in a Shanghai newspaper, Zhonghua ribao, during the final days of the battle for the city in 1937, we see how the news was shaped to impose a narrative of order with a positive teleology at a time when China was plunged into chaos with no guarantee of the eventual outcome of the war. The nature of this narrative is explored through examination of images of the body, as well as the positioning of images in the context of the printed page. The conclusion then contrasts these images with a pictorial history of the Sino-Japanese War published during the Civil War, in 1947. It suggests that although this book is able to bring narrative closure to the earlier conflict, its own narrative is imbued with an unease caused by the reality of the new war that had broken out within months of the ending of the war against Japan, and suggests that narrative closure is never truly obtained.

The Individual and the International ""I'': Zou Taofen and Changing Views of China's Place in the International System

In Heart of Europe, his sweeping account of Polish history, Norman Davies explains the difficulty of writing the history of the Partitions (1795–1918) when no such entity as ‘‘Poland’’ existed on the European map. ‘‘In the absence of a sovereign Polish state’’, he writes, ‘‘social and economic themes can rarely be satisfactorily pursued in any specifically Polish context; whilst for most of the time, Polish politics is narrowed either to the level of the parish pump or else to the two great themes of the age—the preservation of national identity, and the restoration of national independence’’. Poland, of course, did find itself reconstituted, although its travels across that European map were wrenching and violent. Yet for many decades the question of whether Polish nationhood and Polish statehood would ever come together was the most urgent issue for the elites of the vanished Kingdom. The international system of the long 19th century seemed as if it could get along without Poland just fine. In 1896, Liang Qichao, one of the most thoughtful Chinese political critics, cited Poland as an example of what happened to nations which lost the evolutionary struggle. ‘‘Poland was a famous country in Europe’’, he declared. ‘‘Her political institutions were not developed, internal struggles arose daily. Russia, Prussia, and Austria made mutual agreements and divided her as their meat.’’ Poland was not an isolated example of the fascination that Eastern Europe had for Chinese thinkers attempting to understand the changing place that China held in the international system in the age of high imperialism. From the admiration expressed by Liang Qichao for Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth in 1902 to the citation of Czech founding fathers Beneö and Masaryk by the writer Cui Weizhou in the 1930s attempting to whip up support for a campaign against the Japanese in Manchuria, the problems and solutions posed by the break-up of the continental European empires and the establishment of new nation-states provided fruitful material for a Chinese intelligentsia which was

The Cold War: A World History

Middle East (p. 565). Fundamentally, Westad’s interest in the end of the Cold War is different than much existing scholarship. Rather than ask why the Cold War ended, Westad is much more interested in answering the question of with what legacies the Cold War left us. There are, however, several ways in which The Cold War could have offered even more to its readers. Midway through the book, Westad broadens his lens geographically. Whereas much of the first half of the book explored the domestic politics and international relations of the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and European powers, in the second half he turns to examining the Cold War in Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia. At this point, Westad shifts to chapters organised by geography rather than chronology, which means that we read about Eisenhower in Lebanon after learning about Nixon’s visit to China. Such a juxtaposition may present a challenge to more general readers. Given that the book’s structure reveals the author’s conception of the Cold War, he might have more explicitly explained this choice and its advantages to his readers. Similarly, the subtitle of The Cold War is A World History. For the benefit of his scholarly readers, Westad might have explained what is gained by adopting a world-history approach as opposed to those of international history or transnational history. Westad’s chapter on India hinges around 1971. Although he does not assert this explicitly, the chronological centre of many of his later chapters suggests he sees the 1970s as a key decade for the conflict. Yet, Westad argues that it was in the 1970s that the Cold War seemed ‘an entrenched international system’ (p. 475). He might therefore have said more about to what extent the Cold War was either ‘transformed’ or ‘shocked’ by the decade. Finally, Westad frames the Cold War as the high point of conflict between two socio-economic systems, ‘the market’ and ‘the plan’, but he also writes about the Cold War as a system itself: ‘the last great international system’ (pp. 2 and 4). In the end, it is complicated to conceive of the Cold War both as a clash of two systems and as a system itself. I wished the author had distinguished between these different uses of the term. Just as Global Cold War reshaped the study of that conflict, broadening its scope in terms of focus, actors, and sources, so too will The Cold War redirect the work of many in the field. Seasoned scholars and budding graduate students will similarly be inspired by The Cold War to expand the chronological lens of their research or reconsider the conflict in other fruitful ways.