Good afternoon, all, and welcome to this book at lunchtime event on China's Good War,
How World War Two is Shaping a New Nationalism, written by Professor Ammeter and published by Harvard University Press.
My name is Wes Williams and I'm the director here at Torch.
It's a great pleasure to be here to introduce the first book at lunchtime of this term book at lunchtime.
As regulars will know it's Torture's flagship event book series taking the
form of fortnightly bite sized book discussions with a range of commentators.
In other times, we'd have lunch for you as well. But we hope that you've managed to get yourself some lunch to eat alongside today's discussion.
Please do take a look at our website, a newsletter for the full programme for next term.
I'll talk about next the very next meeting at the end of today's session.
Today, I'm delighted to welcome Rana Mitter to speak about his book.
Also on today's panel are Professor Vivienne Shu and Professor David Presland, who will be chairing the discussion.
China's Good War examines how for most of its its history, the People's Republic of China limited public discussion of the war against Japan.
But now, as China grows more powerful, the meaning of the war is changing.
Professor Ron Ometer, who can come onscreen at any moment,
argues that China's reassessment of World War two years is central to its newfound confidence abroad and to mounting nationalism at home.
In a moment, I'll hand over to Professor Presland,
who will say a few more words about the book and also introduce the other members of the panel and chair today's discussion.
After this hour, commentators will present their thoughts on the book coming at it from their different disciplines.
We will then give Professor Miss it the chance to respond to some of the points
raised before entering into what promises to be a fascinating discussion.
The event will then conclude with questions from you, the audience. So please do add them to the chat as we go along.
I'll return at the end and sort of harvest them up and bring them back into the discussion.
That's pretty much all that's left for me to do other than to thank you for coming, everyone, and to introduce our chair.
David Presland is professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford and a fellow and thus a close colleague of mine.
An Edmund Hall. His research focuses on modern and contemporary political and cultural history.
And amongst his books are a comparative history of communism, the red flag, communism and the making of the modern world.
And more recently, a merchant soldier sage, a new history of power, a study of the history of market liberalism and its place in global history.
He is, in other words, ideally placed to chair today's discussion.
And so, David, it's with great pleasure that I hand over to you now and disappear in turn from the screen.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Wes, and it's great to be chairing this really discussion, this really interesting book.
And first, I'd like to as well. As I said, the book is extremely topical and very much looking forward to the discussion.
So really, it's just for me to introduce Rahner, who I don't think really needs much introduction.
He is professor of Chinese politics and history at some cross college, has been director of the China Centre kind of study centre.
And his previous publications include A Bitter Revolution,
China's Struggle with the Modern World and forgotten ally China as World War two, 1937 to 45.
So he is an ideal person to be writing and commenting on the U.S. China makes of its wartime history today,
which of course is a very important topic given how difficult Chinese American Western relations and he will be.
I will be making a comment. And and also we're delighted to be joined by Professor Vivian Shu,
who is professor emeritus of Contemporary Chinese Studies and emeritus fellow St. Anthony's College,
and she works on 20th century Chinese state and government techniques.
She publications include The Reach of the State, and she is, of course,
an ideal person to comment on Rhona's analysis of Chinese politics and contemporary politics.
So I'd like to I will be talking more broadly about broader issues, I think, because I'm not a China specialist,
Vivian, I think we'll be talking about the implications for Chinese history.
But I'm delighted to be able to hand over to Rana, who will be reading a section from his book now.
Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, David, and brief, thanks for me, if I may.
Thank you. To the Hotel Myotis and others who have put this together.
Dave, David, Vivienne for being such brilliant commentators. I know that Vivian is having problems with her camera today.
So if you hear her as a voice, just think of it as kind of a very up-market version of radio for, you know,
the voice is the key thing, even if we don't get to see Vivian, but the rest of us should be visible.
I hope and thank you to all of you for joining us today.
This lunchtime, I thought I just read the first couple of pages of the book itself, China's Good War,
because it lays out my intention in writing it this way very clearly for the audience, which is not Chinese.
In other words, an audience I see mostly of people from the UK, Oxford in particular, perhaps one or two from outside,
but perhaps from a European or and North American context, why they should care about the way in which China thinks about World War Two.
So if I make a couple of pages from the introduction, which is subtitled War, Memory and Nationalism in China.
Some eight decades after its conclusion, the Second World War still grips the imagination of large parts of North America, Europe and Asia.
Tom Brokaw's book, The Greatest Generation from 1998 and Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks is miniseries Band of Brothers from 2001,
captivated American readers and viewers and remain cultural touchstones.
British politicians use metaphors about Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain to describe
the country's decision to exit from the European Union and the sitcom Dad's Army.
Gently teasing the wartime Home Guard still plays on television half a century after it was made.
Japanese automakers produce movies that explore topics that from Homefront suffering to the mentality of kamikaze pilots,
courts in Poland adjudicate the legally correct description of death camps built during the Nazi occupation.
The Second World War is a long way from being all that those societies think about, of course.
But in the United States, Europe, east and west and in Japan,
there is a continuing undercurrent of collective memory about the importance of
that global conflict that doesn't take too much effort to bring to the surface.
Perhaps more surprisingly, the same is true of China when outsiders think of collective memory.
In China, they tend to remember a particular historical moments, many of them traumatic.
The Cultural Revolution or the Opium Wars of the 19th century or the positively the
legacy of traditional Chinese thought may come to mind in the past few decades.
However, memories of another episode have become ever more prominent in China.
The Second World War schoolchildren file by the thousands through the Beijing Museum that
commemorates the war of resistance against Japan as the conflict is known in China,
movies about topics from the massacre of Chinese civilians in Japanese occupied Nanjing
to starvation in a wartime famine in Henan province top the Chinese box office online.
Netizens debate the finer points of the Battle of Shanghai in 1937,
assessing the relative strengths of the Chinese and Japanese troops that lined up against one another by the banks of the river.
One particular moment in 2015 captured the way in which the war has entered the Chinese public sphere with reminders of the past,
used to make points about the future. On 30 September 2015, Tiananmen Square, at the heart of Beijing, was filled by an enormous parade.
Missiles, tanks and marching soldiers all made their way past thousands of spectators from China and abroad.
The event commemorated the 17th anniversary of the end of World War Two.
In Asia, it stood in stark contrast to the elegiac tone of many of the memorials in Europe the preceding spring,
on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945, as on the day the following day,
there was a strong sense that the end of a narrative had been reached.
Veterans and survivors attending a seventieth anniversary in the knowledge that few of them will be there for the 80th.
In China, while veterans stood at the centre of their parade,
there was a much stronger sense that the military display was part of a definition of a new China rather than a farewell to an old one.
And the Chinese event was distinctive in another important way.
The parade was the first national large scale public commemoration of China's role in the Second World War.
It was a major milestone in a process that had been taking place over a long period of time, some 30 years or more,
during which China's attitude towards collective memory of its wartime participation changed significantly with profound
consequences for its domestic and international politics and the consequences of those domestic and international politics.
What I explore in some 300 pages in the book and which I would like to discuss today with David Vivianne, both Chinese and comparative context.
So, David, can I get back to you? Thank you.
Well, it's a great pleasure to comment on this book,
and I think it's an ideal book for a torch discussion as it I think shows very clearly how
humanity's approaches can cast light on important issues of major contemporary importance,
in this case, Chinese Western relations, because this is a book not just about historiographical debates or any politics,
but it looks at them as as runners suggested in his introduction in a broad historical and cultural context, using film, TV, social media sources.
And as a historian of I'm not a historian of of of Russia, of China,
as a historian of USSR and communism who's made a rather limited efforts to learn Chinese,
I realise how ignorant I am of much of this history and of these debates.
And I think most of us have much less of a sense of Chinese perceptions of history in
foreign affairs than we do about Russian ideas or Soviet perceptions during the Cold War.
And I think this is a book that absolutely should be read by policy makers and informed citizens alike.
Now, as I said, I'm not a China specialist.
I'll comment on some broader issues raised by the book and particularly how China's use of war history in memory has legitimised.
It's used it to legitimise its foreign policy. How that compares with the use of these of history by other states,
what it tells us more generally about the role of history and ideas in international relations,
and how successful China might be in its efforts to use these histories.
Now, the issue of China's so-called soft power that is a set of ideas used to legitimise its global power
has been widely discussed in Western commentary since the 2000s and normally in a rather smug way.
It's often said the Chinese can never really be a real rival to the US in the sense that,
say, the Marxist USSR or even Maoist China was because it lacks soft power.
So, for instance, the argument goes, it set up Confucius Institutes around the world.
But Confucianism only really has resonance in an East Asian cultural context and can never compete with an American liberal vision,
which is about universal values and can appeal across cultures.
And I suppose my assumption was the Chinese use of wartime history and memory had a similarly limited, domestically focussed nationalistic role.
So what was completely novel to me about Rhona's book was his argument that Chinese
policymakers and political commentators are trying to use the war in a universalised,
outwardly focussed way to justify a global role.
That is, they are arguing that the Chinese, like the Americans and the Soviets,
were a vital force in the antifascist struggle during the war in defeating Japan and in bringing a stable,
rules based order to the world, and that this history justifies that what great power status.
Today they're comparing the Japanese with the Nazis, the destruction of the Nanjing massacres and rapes with the Holocaust,
and they're emulating the US in the region who themselves use a universalised antifascist message, i.e.,
they're the power that rescued Asia from Japanese militarism and then, of course, from communism.
And I think Rhona's argument raises the important broader question,
which is how non liberal states in the modern world can legitimise their regional or global ambitions.
Clearly, Marxism, Leninism was ideal for this purpose, as it's a universalist ideology about universally social values.
It can apply everywhere in any culture. It was used both by the USSR and by Maoist China in between the 50s in the seventies and run.
A story of China echoes that of the USSR, which really from the sixties and seventies, but particularly from the Russia in the nineties.
And two thousands moved away from justifying its global role in international revolutionary terms and increasingly moved towards antifascist message,
arguing that it was the power that defeated Hitler. It and it legitimised itself domestically and internationally as an anti fascist power.
And in a sense, this clearly is what China has been trying to do as a runner.
So fascinatingly explains. But as I think the book also shows fascinatingly, this war memory is Janus faced because on the one hand,
in stressing the state's role in saving the world from fascism, it justifies an assertive foreign policy.
In the present, it says to its ambitious elites can say, we are this antifascist power.
We have a global role. On the other hand, popular war memory tends to be rather different because it often focuses on stoical,
ordinary populations that make sacrifices for the common good, and that's not very interested in nationalist assertiveness.
So the UK example, for instance,
is the notion of the blitz spirit and there are Soviet and Ranchos Chinese equivalents and these tends to have much more popular.
These tend to have much more popular resonance and they're not so interested in global issues.
So I think it seems to me that there are advantages and astronomer's singer advantages and disadvantages to elites,
to this double aspect of your memory. War memory can unite elites and the broader population behind the notion of national exceptionalism.
But they have different messages and elites often find the popular.
Memory a bit too isolationist and populist for their own purposes.
So, for instance, if we see if we think of the role of war memory recently in in Britain in Brexit nationalism,
it was the was the populist elements that were there to the fore. This is the sort that that interested in global adventures.
It doesn't desperately want to give foreign aid.
Supporters of global Britain tend to use the myth of a liberal free trade empire rather than a sort of war blitz,
spirit type memory and has run the shows. There is a similar tension in Chinese war memory.
Elites aren't always happy with how it's understood in popular terms.
There's a fascinating discussion about responses to the British film Dunkirk in China, which is run as has topped the box office in China.
But actually assertive nationalists didn't like it for celebrating stoicism in defeat and a sense of
victimhood or whereas they wanted a film to a war film to emphasise strength and national assertiveness,
i.e. globalisation. And so I suppose this brings me to the questions I'd like to ask Rana,
which is how long lasting does he think this Chinese good war legitimisation strategy is going to is going to be?
Is it going to work? Because he says the real weakness of it is that it has little resonance outside Asia, as the Chinese are realising,
because Westerners are so ignorant of Asian history and in that sense is even less affected than the Russian good war strategy,
which may alienate its immediate neighbours, but actually does have a resonance some residents in the West.
And so I'd like to ask him really, might it be ultimately more rational for China to return to a global legitimisation
strategy more founded on economic development themes rather than antifascist themes,
i.e. a more nationalistic conservative version,
perhaps of the old Marxist Leninism, one that stresses the advantages of the Chinese model of state development,
the power of strong states to do what they like within their own borders without liberal interference.
And whatever happens, it would be interesting to think about whatever course China chooses,
how that's going to interact with a Biden administration that's trying to resuscitate a decaying liberal world order,
which, of course, owes much to Cold War liberal ideas. So thanks very much for those comments.
And I'd like to now hand over to Vivian, who will make it gives some responses from from a China specialist.
OK, thank you, Rana. As you well know, I'm an enthusiastic consumer of historical research, not myself,
like David, a card carrying historian, but for whatever it might be worth.
Let me say that I've read this new book of yours as very much a meta sort of historical exercise.
It teaches us a lot about the history of certain persons, places and events, to be sure.
But the book as a whole seems far more concerned with alerting us to the dodgier
or the more unsafe and inconstant qualities of what we receive as history,
which is to say,
concerned with sensitising readers to the layer cake of knowledge is that are comprised in what we believe our national histories to be.
You shall hear not only have the national histories we moderns receive are sifted and hammered into very particular shapes from the outset.
But how also, even once broadly accepted, certain collective understandings may later be repressed or just forgotten, and how even later, parts,
at least of once discarded understandings, may yet again be recovered,
reimagined and repurposed to meet evolving social goals to operationalise this matter agenda.
In the book, you deploy your very interesting concept of circuits of memory, alluding to several different circuits where the war is concerned,
one that spans the U.K., the U.S. and Canada,
one reaching across Russia and some of its neighbouring countries, one in Japan and quite another in China.
And though you don't discuss any others,
I think we might imagine there may be further such circuits of memory and play over portions of Southeast Asia,
for example, or over states that managed to remain neutral throughout the war and also perhaps over different parts of North Africa.
The work documents why and how, since the 1980s,
Chinese authorities and other influencers have been so intently bent on collecting and revising national memories of that war,
projecting reworked historical reminiscences of the nation's struggle and re-evaluations
of China's importance in the overall war effort to audiences at home and abroad.
You make it clear that while this concerted effort at RE remembering has been greeted warmly and largely successful at home,
it's meant a much cooler, more diffident reaction around the world.
And while I think we can pretty quickly see why foreign audiences might well be largely unaware or unimpressed,
I think the first question I'd want to put to you would be about just why you
think it is that this effort has met with such broad receptivity at home.
Because the deeper question I'd really like to get at concerns the way you've chosen here,
to represent the accretion of all those other Chinese national memories very painfully acquired during all those long years before the 1980s.
Would you bracket together under the heading of China's Cold War?
And I ask about this because what I felt almost went missing entirely or was
made invisible beneath this label of the Cold War was the impact of the Chinese
people's repeated and desperately raw and socially exhausting collective experience
of another kind of struggle over identity during those four Cold War decades.
That being, of course, the continuous struggle over class identity.
My question, in short, I think, is whether or not you would agree that in China up until the 1980s,
for as long as class identity was determinative of one's social worth,
prospects and allegiances, questions of national historical identity simply carried far less violence in domestic affairs or for that matter,
in China's international affairs. And so only after the preoccupations of continuous class struggle were finally set aside.
Would a serious effort to reconstruct a cross-class, common,
shared national identity and to resituated that identity explicitly in the war experience.
Would that have any purchase in Chinese political life?
And the second topic on which I'd like to draw you out if I can, concerns 1989,
especially the post Tiananmen Square crackdown and a possible connexion I think I see between that crisis and the
parties project of reclaiming the war experience as just the right new historical anchor for national identity.
Now, you say clearly in the book that this project of remembering the war had gotten underway before 1989, but that it speeded up afterward.
And I ask about this because it happens. I was spending quite a lot of time in China, different parts of the country during 1990, 91, 92.
And one of the things going on everywhere just then was an immense proliferation of colour televisions,
not just in big cities, but small towns and rural areas.
To this sudden abundance of affordable TV sets created huge demand and a rapt audience for new nightly programming.
And what I saw being broadcast on TV then was what seemed to be just an endless stream of serialised dramas,
almost all set precisely during the war and very, very much featuring the People's Army officers and soldiers and sometimes their extended families.
These could be melodramatic at times, but they certainly weren't light or frivolous entertainment.
And I did not find them morally simplistic either. Not cowboys and Indians types of fare.
They tended, I thought at the time, to have complex anguishing plots, often involving spies,
informers, other tangled and ambiguous social realities and highly fraught human relations.
Even amongst those fighting on the same side, those dramas, especially on life and death risks,
on facing fear and finding courage, watching them evidentally wildly popular as they were watching those series.
Then in the Post and on political moment,
I interpreted them primarily as part of a project of urgent damage control and image rebuilding for the play,
whose standing had been so badly shaken after the violent suppression of the protests, dramatising historical memories of Army service.
When the war was on with only, I thought, the obviously most exciting and compelling setting to select for reclaiming the prestige of the military.
But what reading your new book has made me wonder now is whether you would agree with me that it might actually have been the coincidence of
that very pressing need at that post Eighty-Nine moment to find the most poignantly persuasive ways to rebuild the public image of the play,
which in turn would press party state leaders further and further forward with refocusing the national public culture around.
Remembered experiences of the war as the crucible in which the national will then embodied in the People's Army was well and truly forged.
Well, I did have a third question,
but I think I've about consumed my time and so I will stop right now and turn things back to David to take us forward.
Thanks very much, Vivian. And yeah, now I'd like to ask Ron if he'd like to respond to to any of those comments.
Thank you. Well, thank you both very much, both to David and to Vivian for having both read so carefully and put forward such thoughtful questions.
And I think what I'll do, in a sense, is take elements of both of the sets of questions and put them together and some of my answers,
because actually, in some ways, I think they relate to each other really in some quite interesting ways, not least,
for instance, in David's bringing up the immensely important subject of Marxism, Leninism,
which I think has been under examined in terms of looking at some of the aspects of contemporary Chinese ideology and linking that to the audience.
Very insightful question about class and where that was and where it goes.
Another under examined but actually very relevant topic.
So let me try and come back with a couple of of thoughts.
The first one is to do with David's question about the durability of this phenomenon of China becoming obsessed with World War Two.
How lasting is it and where does it make a difference?
Well, I think, first of all, I mean, I clearly can't give a definitive answer to that that question.
But what I can point out and do point out in the book is that this iteration, in other words,
the reform era version of China's rediscovery of World War Two is now something like 40 years old, and she has no particular sign of slowing down.
It's emerged in its modern form in the early 1980s. So as Villon says before Tiananmen Square, but certainly in that reform era,
and it continues to reshape itself in all sorts of very vibrant ways today.
So just to give a couple of quick examples of how it's relevant in the contemporary sphere,
the year have just gone through the year 2020 or the top of my head, I can see the Chinese state and wider society doing the following things.
Number one, when the pandemic broke out, one of the major metaphors or analogies of choice they reached for was the idea that this was a people's war,
people's war against the virus, which, of course, is a good Maoist phrase.
It's a phrase that absolutely comes from those years of Japanese conflict, conflict with Japan against the invasion of the 1930s and 1940s,
or another example, the repeated use by Xi Jinping and onea the foreign minister of China.
So the president and foreign minister, no less, not just once, but on many occasions.
But one that comes to mind was, say, the Munich Security Conference last year, big international gathering.
The U.S. secretary of state at the time, Mike Pompeo, was there. Mike Esposa, then defence secretary was there.
What was the analogy? Which one you used to speak to these opponents, you might say, in the hall.
He reminded them that at the end of World War two in 1945 and February four, that the fighting is even finished, of course, in Asia,
Europe, actually, at that point at that moment, China was not just a signatory, but the first signatory to the United Nations charter.
In other words, laying claim to China as a founding member of the post 1945 international order,
something that was a direct consequence of Chinese contribution to to World War Two.
But that also enables me to give a third example, which also goes to David's second question.
If I could we them together in this way, which is the question of.
When certain aspects of this idea of World War Two being this immensely important time
for China are suitable to bring up and when they get covered over or suppressed.
And just a quick reminder, I think not been said yet,
and I think we should also remember that those are not specialists were able to in China was a very serious set of events,
over 10 million dead, nearly 100 million refugees and destruction of most of China's infrastructures, railways, its roads, all of that.
And by no means, incidentally,
holding down more than half a million Japanese troops between 1937 when the war broke out in 1941 and Pearl Harbour until the Americans,
the British came along. So, you know, the Chinese contribution is not pivotal in the way that the Russian one, Soviet one certainly was.
But nonetheless, it was immensely important in terms of the first phase of that war in in Asia.
And I think it shouldn't be underestimated. The Chinese certainly don't underestimate.
So in that sense, I think very interesting and indicative of something else that happened last year, 2020,
which was that a particular movie was actually the best at the highest box office of any movie in the world's movie called The Eight Hundred Bobbye.
It was released and shows Chinese film released in China. To be honest,
Chinese from the only country in the world that had its cinematic instruments to 2020 because of the rather robust
way in which they locked down the country after the pandemics and cinemas were opened again from the summer.
So perhaps to the breaking box office records globally was was easier for China last year.
But this was done not to get to to make the 300 million US dollars at the box office.
So this is serious, seriously successful film. And the topic was the last.
And a small regiment of Chinese soldiers in 1937 fighting the Japanese in Shanghai in the first phase of Japanese invasion.
But these soldiers were not members of the Chinese communist armies.
They were members of the Chinese nationalist Guomindang Clementine.
You may have seen that phrasing which took place in nineteen thirty seven in November in real life at a place called Sahur Warehouse in Shanghai.
This was a movie version of that. Now, as I say,
this is very interesting because to actually have the party that was essentially the ultimate opponent of the communists in the civil war,
being celebrated in this film was something that was part of a much wider phenomenon that has emerged in China in the last 40 years.
I mentioned,
which is a sort of slow rehabilitation of at least parts of the old Chiang Kai-Shek nationalist movement and their battle against Japanese,
which the communists never used to rate at all. But now actually do give a sort of grudgingly patriotic Catala.
But the thing that makes that I think very interesting is that one year previously in the year 2019, this exact same film, the eight hundred,
which was about to be a big blockbuster hit, had been banned, completely banned in China just before it was supposed to be released.
And the reason for the difference, the difference a year makes was in 2013,
it was the seventh anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China that was made clear by communist sources that
there was no way that a film celebrating the nationalist war effort could be released in a year of import to the Communist Party.
Last year, 2020 was different. That was 75 years of V-J Day since the defeat of Japan.
So it was actually permitted in that sense for the release that shows the sort of malleability
and the changeability of when parts of the world multistorey can be politically useful in China.
And when they step back from the historical front line, as you might, as you might say,
as we go on in conversation with a couple of similarities and differences in Russia
in terms of the way that they talk about the Great Patriotic War in popular culture,
there are things that could be said and unsaid. Just one of the big questions, briefly, if I if I may, because they speak some really salient matters.
I think it is absolutely right that after 1989, the rehabilitation, particularly of the eight through me,
the new fourth army, the major communist armies in China, which had fought against the Japanese,
was part of, as you say, a sort of trauma management trauma recovery from the Army's point of view,
having basically been sent into fire and fire on and kill large numbers of Chinese civilians on June 4th, 1989.
But the process itself was and has been a longer one. Rehabilitation of those wartime stories, not just communists,
but also nationalists fighting the Japanese began in the early 1980s and essentially continued apace ever since.
And that in that sense and therefore it comes to the question, as you pointed out,
of where did the previous discourse with discourse of class in particular really emerge as part of that wider sense of struggle over identity,
an attempt to try and kind of forge some new sense of place to be?
Well, I have to say, I think the answer I would give to that, judging by what one sees,
by the way, in which the Second World War is presented, is that there is an increasingly urgent.
You see on the part of the Communist Party in the 80s, 90s,
2000s to get away from that kind of class discourse to instead provide this kind of unifying national idea,
which actually sort of almost sort of skirts over the class differences that remain very real during the wartime years.
And it's notable that amongst the people who have been most persecuted, you might say that's probably a fair way to put it.
In recent years in China,
a young Chinese Marxist groups based off of the major university like Peking University who've taken the party's rhetoric of class
struggle for the past seriously and have attempted things like organising trade union workers in Chinese factories and farms,
has probably picked up and, you know, sort of taken away by the security authorities for basically causing causing trouble in that in that sense.
So we have come to an ironic world. I think it's ironic anyway,
in the early 20s in China by which major film makers essentially glorifying the wartime activities of Chiang Kai-Shek, the former,
you know, deadly enemy of Chairman Mao,
and putting that on the screen for millions of people to watch and buy tickets while eating popcorn, that's fine.
But being young students who rather that Mao himself, when he was young, become inspired by the idea that, you know, class struggle is real,
that people's class identities and worker identities need to be taken seriously, that get you arrested and basically locked away as as a result.
And if that is not an irony of the present day, I don't know what is.
David. I think you're on mutual.
Yes, thank you.
No, I think I've been on the Russian on the Russian side, I think the the comparisons with with Russia are very interesting because in a way,
the Russians have been trying to stop the Soviets,
trying to move from a sort of communist Class-Based agenda to a nationalist war based one from, you know, from from the 60s and 70s.
And they've been doing it for a long time and it's become even more intense.
And so, yeah, the parallels with the with the Chinese example are absolutely fascinating.
And I but I can see there is still a big tension between the class and the nationalist messages in the sense that there isn't really in Russia.
So that's the big difference, I suppose. I wonder if I could throw the question back to the civil service and get get thoughts,
because, of course, you put forward the idea and I think rightly,
that class is immensely important factor in shaping the 19 late 1940s, up to the 1980s, the way that China thought about itself.
But of course, class itself at that time was a very, very changeable sort of identity.
I mean, ideas of class during the Cultural Revolution and certainly before that in China became essentially hereditary.
The sense that you inherited your your parents class status in a way that wasn't true previously.
And linked to that, I would also sort of suggest that I think nationalist ideas,
ideas or ideas of China is the sort of nation state that fought that was still very powerful during that time.
The son of Japanese war was talked about, of course, under Mao, but it was talked about in very limited ways, essentially,
as the Chinese Communist Party may be the only leading force that had anything relevant to say about fighting the Japanese.
So that meant that the nationalists were left out of the going down, the Americans were left out of it.
The British indeed were left out of it. And in that sense, it was a political discourse rather than an idea,
rather than an analytical discourse about what had happened during those wartime years.
So I wonder if you could imagine back for some further reflection on that question of kind of class and nation and how they come together or separate.
Well, I think. I'm surprised to hear you say that you think that class was a somewhat mutable concept,
it was really quite fixed in people's lives and as you said, it was something that was inherited.
You are right.
If you're referring, I think, run it to the possibility that one's cost standpoint after a certain period could override one's actual technical class.
And if you were a technically assigned class and if you were able to demonstrate in the
appropriate ways that your cost standpoint was really progressive and really revolutionary,
then you could make some inroads. But the inescapable oddity of your of your class assignment was very great.
I think I remember quite clearly that although it was first put forward in 1978, that class labels could be lifted.
It took quite some time even after that, for people to have them lifted and for them to start behaving in ways as if they were more
equally citizens and more equally entitled to their political opinions and standpoints.
I just say on that very because the audience I think I expressed myself badly, so badly.
I think you're absolutely right or what you say. But changeable was that prior to the establishment of what became the Maoist order,
I think the ways in which Chinese political thinkers tend to think about class related to categories that,
say European Marxist thinkers would have recognised quite clearly off that point, exactly as you say,
class took on various types of very fixed form, particularly, as I say, the heritability of class,
which, for example, has been writing about quite interestingly recently,
and that may be what I meant, become more unfamiliar to study that class was something which could take on as an inheritance for your parents.
But in terms of mutability during the Mao period, you're actually right.
Of course, it stays very, very fixed and it's very difficult to get out of your class status.
It's not movable between statuses at all in many cases. Hmm.
I suppose perhaps I could just come back on this question about.
So you've been talking with Vivien about the domestic implications of the war myth and clearly it's extremely popular.
But in your book, you also talk about the ways in which the Chinese feel very miffed, really,
that the international community don't really take this war effort seriously and they should be taken as seriously as, say,
the Americans and Russians in the war, which I mean, no one can entirely understand that view,
but that that isn't a view that others do hold because they're so ignorant,
I suppose, and the Americans have been so good to the Americans and the Soviets.
The Russians have been much better at promoting their own their own war stories internationally.
So I'm just wondering how I mean, what how are Chinese leaders going to see this,
the role of this war memory as a as a tool of international policy, of global policy in the longer term?
I mean, for instance, presumably it has a resonance in Asia.
But when you're talking when say they're trying to gain influence in Ethiopia or Africa, these things are going to be much less influential.
They're going to be much presumably it is against the sort of Maoist background,
the links that were established in the Maoist period or these sort of ideas of China having an ideal development model.
That's going to be the the message that's going to have some resonance rather than some war history.
Or if I may throw in one other alternative possibility, though, that could be the image of China's much earlier history,
its imperial history and its its imperial grandeur and the naturalness of its being
a big country with a huge area of influence over Asia and now even maybe farther.
In other words, joining with David and wondering whether in a sense,
what you've documented in this book was a trip that the remembering of the war was a very important transitional phase.
But going on and finding an even deeper vocabulary and image and memory of history may turn
out to be the next phase that we're looking at with China's increasingly under Xi Jinping,
apparently especially increasingly determined recollection of the grandeur of its own imperial past.
Yeah. So let me put those two together, because I think they dovetail very, very nicely.
And I think that they both really important point on the head.
I think the key thing to remember is that none of these things are either or that they're not Zero-Sum.
And I think that's what a. The ways we sometimes when we're looking at this very,
very complex way in which China is presenting itself both within its own society and to the outside world,
just think that it must be one thing or the other. I mean, when he says we know she is really the Newmark's at all or that, you know,
China is really kind of reasserting its old imperial power or that China is,
you know, really just interested in economics as if any of these things were exclusive to the other.
And of course, the point is that all of these things are actually part of a much more complex mixture.
So I would sort of take over my fingers,
both the things that David has said and had a couple more to it seems to me at the moment that the way that China is presenting itself,
both at home and in the world, brings together a variety of different messages.
And it seems to be some of the most important following in a.
Number one is about modern history. And you're actually right, David.
I mean, it has just much more resonance in certain parts of the world than others, even in Asia.
I think it perhaps has less than they might have wanted because I mean, I think one of the reasons behind the idea of what I call circuits of memory,
which can be mentioned because of essentially the American domination of Western Europe and Soviet domination of Eastern Europe during the Cold War,
which one of the reasons I think the Cold War is it is important you have a sort of
united set of assumptions and beliefs about what the war time period actually meant.
There was never really true in Asia because everything sped up so fast.
The Japanese thought the Japanese about the war.
Most parts of Southeast Asia were too busy fighting for own freedom in the 40s, 50s and 60s and used it all differently.
In China itself, of course, was largely isolated from from from neighbours in that in that sense,
the chance for a kind of collective understanding of the wartime history was less.
But nonetheless, even within China itself, as I indicated in the book,
I think that the remembering of World War Two is this traumatic event that
brought people together and yet somehow set the country apart is very important.
Also, of course, the Opium Wars,
the beginning of the century of humiliation of China and the outside world and other events to the Korean War was very big last year of being revived,
not least because in China it's not called Korean War.
It's called cuney, the anti-American resistance to America, which has a particular contemporary vibe.
But aside from modern history, you know, the economist Dick argument is important. The idea of rising living standards and all of that.
And it's one of the things, of course, which the Chinese themselves, in a wider panoply of of things as compared with the old Soviet Union and said
essentially the Soviets got this wrong and we got this we got this right.
Then, of course, what they mentioned, which is the kind of much more premodern imperial system of understanding.
Clearly, the Chinese Communist Party is not going to say that about itself. But it is interesting what they do say what Xi Jinping himself to say,
which is to talk in this very kind of bland way about Chinese wisdom and Chinese wisdom is
basically we are talking about premodern philosophy and the worldview that goes with it.
So essentially, it's what Vivienne's getting at, but it's phrased in a way that is both politically acceptable in a communist society
and also one that won't frighten the horses when it kind of appears in the world.
But it is very much there. And it's in many of the official speeches that one sees from the top leadership these days is worth paying attention to,
because ideas such as Ren Benevolence, which has a very clear Confucian ring to it, are being repurposed for the for the contemporary world.
And the final one is, I think, the sort of wider sense that you see for the Bellefleur initiative of authoritarian developmentalism.
Both of these things are important, not authoritarian, I think, in the sense that China is trying to create many Chinas everywhere.
I really think it's not doing that and couldn't even if it wanted to.
But I think it is promoting a type of politics that is more tolerant of non liberal forms of governance in Myanmar when I don't think
the Chinese behind that they were quite happy with San Suu Kyi to whom they were very close and who was elected pretty freely.
But now that there is a military junta, I don't think the Chinese are going to do much to try and reverse what's happened in Myanmar.
So I think you might say authoritarian, tolerant in that sense. But linked to it is this very strong idea of developmentalism.
The idea of actually collective economic good is where the action is, and that's where Ethiopia comes in.
And the final part and again, this brings in both Évian and David, is that China is much more will put it to relax,
is not the right weapon enthusiastic perhaps to talk about itself as a Marxist,
that it is society today and looking particularly if you look at the speeches that are all the articles that are put in the major
theoretical journals like to assure the continued use of terms which any good Hegelian will understand from terms of dialectic,
biltong, struggle, modern contradiction,
and all of these things which Mao of course talked about in great detail and which were rather downplayed in the 1990s and 2000s that were absent.
But, you know, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, a much keener to talk about,
particularly Hu about a harmonious society, the sort of Confucian commonality rather than the dialectic.
I have a sense that she, Jinping, has been idolised in many, many ways,
but the idea that actually it's much less embarrassed about being seen as openly Marxist Leninist,
I think is one quite significant, if not change, at least ideological shift direction at all.
Four or five of those factors are bubbling away in China today.
Some of them had much more purchase at home. I think probably the wartime language is more powerful within China than it is outside.
Some have more purchased overseas. And that's where the developmentalist side, I think, comes in.
I think it'll be extremely interesting to see whether the Marxist Leninist end of things actually has any
external purchase on the grounds that if China wishes to present itself to the wider world as a Marxist,
then the state would have succeeded and produced, you know, I think was Lenin who said, well, actually,
I was convinced, as we said, that at some point the Bolshevik state would have public toilets made of gold.
Well, that is not something that has yet happened in China.
But I point out that Xi Jinping did, in fact, have, amongst other things, a five star clean toilets campaign just a few years ago.
So maybe there is a sense in which they will sort of rip off the veil and be much less embarrassed about saying,
you know what, we Marxists and we're successful Marxist, Leninists, and we're successful that it is deal with it world.
If so, that would be, I think, an extraordinarily interesting, a slightly unnerving sort of dialogic encounter.
Yeah, so I think, yes, perhaps open up to questions from the audience.
And I know what I know I can I can do this bit, if you like, and so far there's really only the one.
So I would hope that others might come in with them as we go.
And in some sense, you may have answered this already run up.
But the question is,
how successfully does the Chinese state rationalise away the major contribution of the nationalist movement when promoting its new war history?
And I suppose I, having listened to the discussion and some of what both David and Fabian have said,
I wonder if you might think about that also in relation to what what are we saying when we're saying China these days?
Because I'm struck that David is sort of moving between Russia and the Soviets at various points in your explanation?
And understandably so. And of course, you know, who or what is China in relation to this new narrative that you're putting forward?
Might be an interesting might be one of the things behind that question, perhaps, as well.
I think that's right. And that question of what China is, is neither a new one, nor is it one that has been resolved.
And it can be answered in many different ways.
Then my own favourite bumper sticker answer to this, which is a bit of a cheat, but it could be helpful, is to remember that China is a plural noun.
And I think that's one of the issues, of course, right now that we have a problem with, because China's own party state for the most part,
tends to think about itself these days as a kind of quite top down state in which border control is very important in controlling the border lands.
Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Simple has become very central,
but it's also simultaneously pushing much more strongly than it ever did before about the idea of
overseas Chinese or Chinese diaspora as being part of a kind of wider understanding of what China is.
I think that the the barrier and there are many that today's Peoples Republic of China has in terms of kind of leaping over that,
is that they haven't yet worked out any very convincing way to get the plurality
of all those different Chinese into their definition of central China is.
So in other words, you think about the Taiwan question as the starting point for Beijing is,
look, Taiwan has always been part of China geographically and otherwise.
It has to come back whether it wants to or not.
But the question of what that means for Chinese identity, if you're saying, look, these people aren't Taiwanese, whatever that means,
they are Chinese, just they need to come to realise that when you get to the next stage, you say, OK, and what exactly does that mean?
You know, what is the actual significance that what does it mean that, you know, Hong Kong is likely to be part of Chinese sovereignty in 1997?
Nonetheless, think of themselves clearly,
many of them do in a way that is not the same way that a top elite thinker in Beijing thinks about her or himself.
How does that fit into the discourse on that? At the moment, there seems to be really a sort of deafening silence.
So I think resolving that question of identity and that's where actually things like World War Two,
which because they've said has been one of the perhaps relatively rare examples where the People's Republic of China has quite successfully taken an
almost oppositional set of ideas from the old nationalists and absorb them into the way of I think that it thinks about itself in the present day.
So I say, you know, to Beijing, you can do it when you want to. When you try, maybe trying harder might be the way to where to go.
And I thank you and I wonder if I was struck by Vivian's notion that this there's also the sort
of imperial past that's being in both invoked and and sort of at the same time set aside here.
And I wondered if you had thoughts also on the way in which this good war story might relate to the sort of what is China in an imperial?
Because there's internal imperialism as well, of course, as well as external imperialism.
And I wondered if that's a question that Vivian might want to think about and the ways in which it could be worked in.
Yes. I mean, yes, broadly, really, in relation to the sort of good war story, in a sense,
who is the good war stories serving most in this question of Chinese identity, if it's in relation to the kinds of questions you were raising?
I think what I think about the Imperial. A trope being used as a as a means of attraction and explanation for the role that China thinks it
should take now is usable in some parts of the world and less so in others in parts of the world,
which experienced empire and which may still believe that empire is inevitable.
They experienced one and then they've lived under arguably the American empire in this whole post-war period.
For them, the notion for some elements in those countries,
the notion that another empire could be naturally on the rise and that they
will need to find their place in that in that empire will make a lot of sense.
And so in those countries, I think the benevolent imperial is a modus operandi that the Chinese may find far more effective than the good war.
And I agree with Rana entirely that these can coexist and cooperate and be pulled one out of the hat and then the other out of the hat as needed.
I don't want to know, but, yeah, no thank you,
that's that's certainly very helpful for the non China specialist, such as as it were representing here.
David, again. Have you any thoughts on that? No, I there are a couple of QAD, though, from the from the audience.
Yes. Well, the one we've looked at already, which is the nationalist comment and question.
The second is, again, a similar question really.
What's the reaction from Taiwan on the official level and in general public to this motion from mainland China,
mainland China that you've analysed in your book or. Well, brief answer to that.
Essentially, it almost depends how old you are. As part of the answer to that question.
I would say that the idea that there is a shared history of resistance against the Japanese between Chinese nationalists coming down
and Chinese communists is much more shared by the generation now very old that actually fled the mainland in 1949 of civil war,
or perhaps, you know, their their children and the older generation.
And those tend to be people who voted for the women down on Taiwan in its more democratic form in recent years.
But recently, popularity in Taiwan has moved much more towards a much more autonomous idea of what Taiwan is,
that it's a sort of separate entity, a separate state. This is something, of course, that Beijing regards as an absolute red line,
so that a discussion of this has become very fraught in all sorts of ways since Beijing offers more and
more bloodcurdling warnings about what will happen if Taiwan actually were to declare a separation,
which hasn't done at the moment. But it's obviously moving in directions where it feels as much as communality.
So I'd say that many of the stories of that kind of shared experience of fighting the Japanese,
which both Chinese communists and Chinese nationalists would have had in common even when they had very little else in common,
would still bring together those above a certain age and who feel a strong sense of cultural links to the mainland.
But more and more, I would say that, you know, people who are in their 20s, people in their 30s,
you know, teenagers, school children and so forth, do not share that shared sense of identity.
And as I say, I think it's one of the great failings of Beijing that they have so far failed to articulate a way in which
their proposition about why they should be closer links between the mainland and the island are attractive,
rather than basically saying, you know, if you don't agree with us, we're going to invade,
which is certainly not a very emotionally persuasive way of putting the question to put it at its most mild.
Thank you so much. Where we're running out of time, of course.
As you know, we could talk for a good long time about this, but I wanted to before we left.
Thank all three of you.
So, Vivian, to David Precent and running mate, thank you so much for this really, really instructive and interesting discussion.
I'm sorry, Vivian, that we didn't quite get to see you,
but it was very good radio and I'm hoping that those present might join us again in two weeks time.
When we return, actually, to the question of, if you like, usable war memories, where we discussed porcelain pome on the downfall of My City,
which is a new recent collection of poems by Dawes Green bein translated by Karen Leader about the bombing of Dresden.
And the author and the translator will be present.
They'll be joined by Professor Patrick Major from Redding University and also by the writer and artist Edmund Devall.
So do come along again in two weeks time. I think that the details from the chat.
Thank you again very much indeed for all of you for being here today and most of
all to our speakers for animating such an interesting and informative discussion.
Many thanks. Thank you all very much. Great people of it.