with Rana Mitter, BBC Radio presenter, professor of Chinese history at Oxford University & author of China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism
in conversation with Simon Kuper
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The Chinese regime never used to want to talk about their country’s experience in World War Two. The Japanese occupation of parts of China was felt to be a humiliating episode that was best forgotten, and the Communists were uncomfortable that their nationalist enemy Chiang Kai-Shek had been China’s main wartime leader. There had also been too much embarrassing Chinese collaboration with the Japanese.
But as Rana Mitter describes in his new book China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism, China has rediscovered its war. Today WWII is constantly present in Chinese movies, TV shows, street art, popular writing, museums and social media. Wartime China is now presented as victor, not victim. Another effect: Beijing is being positioned as a creator and protector of the international order that came out of the war—an order, China argues, that’s now under threat from the United States. China’s rediscovery of the war has become a platform for the new, assertive Chinese nationalism promoted by President Xi Jin-Ping.
“China has always drawn on its past to draw lessons for the contemporary political scene,” Mitter says. “I believe that to help us understand the new China, we must look at its past.”
Rana Mitter is one of the world’s leading scholars of contemporary Chinese history. He's a regular presenter of Free Thinking, a BBC radio program on arts and ideas. And he is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at Oxford, where he also directs the University China Centre. His other books include the award winning A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World and China’s War with Japan, 1937-45: The Struggle for Survival.
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