1 00:00:07,790 --> 00:00:13,400 Good afternoon, all, and welcome to this book at lunchtime event on China's Good War, 2 00:00:13,400 --> 00:00:22,700 How World War Two is Shaping a New Nationalism, written by Professor Ammeter and published by Harvard University Press. 3 00:00:22,700 --> 00:00:26,150 My name is Wes Williams and I'm the director here at Torch. 4 00:00:26,150 --> 00:00:32,360 It's a great pleasure to be here to introduce the first book at lunchtime of this term book at lunchtime. 5 00:00:32,360 --> 00:00:36,980 As regulars will know it's Torture's flagship event book series taking the 6 00:00:36,980 --> 00:00:42,380 form of fortnightly bite sized book discussions with a range of commentators. 7 00:00:42,380 --> 00:00:51,290 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. 8 00:00:51,290 --> 00:00:55,610 Please do take a look at our website, a newsletter for the full programme for next term. 9 00:00:55,610 --> 00:01:00,950 I'll talk about next the very next meeting at the end of today's session. 10 00:01:00,950 --> 00:01:05,990 Today, I'm delighted to welcome Rana Mitter to speak about his book. 11 00:01:05,990 --> 00:01:14,150 Also on today's panel are Professor Vivienne Shu and Professor David Presland, who will be chairing the discussion. 12 00:01:14,150 --> 00:01:24,050 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. 13 00:01:24,050 --> 00:01:29,270 But now, as China grows more powerful, the meaning of the war is changing. 14 00:01:29,270 --> 00:01:32,960 Professor Ron Ometer, who can come onscreen at any moment, 15 00:01:32,960 --> 00:01:43,730 argues that China's reassessment of World War two years is central to its newfound confidence abroad and to mounting nationalism at home. 16 00:01:43,730 --> 00:01:46,280 In a moment, I'll hand over to Professor Presland, 17 00:01:46,280 --> 00:01:55,150 who will say a few more words about the book and also introduce the other members of the panel and chair today's discussion. 18 00:01:55,150 --> 00:02:00,700 After this hour, commentators will present their thoughts on the book coming at it from their different disciplines. 19 00:02:00,700 --> 00:02:04,000 We will then give Professor Miss it the chance to respond to some of the points 20 00:02:04,000 --> 00:02:08,590 raised before entering into what promises to be a fascinating discussion. 21 00:02:08,590 --> 00:02:15,130 The event will then conclude with questions from you, the audience. So please do add them to the chat as we go along. 22 00:02:15,130 --> 00:02:19,780 I'll return at the end and sort of harvest them up and bring them back into the discussion. 23 00:02:19,780 --> 00:02:26,770 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. 24 00:02:26,770 --> 00:02:32,800 David Presland is professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford and a fellow and thus a close colleague of mine. 25 00:02:32,800 --> 00:02:38,410 An Edmund Hall. His research focuses on modern and contemporary political and cultural history. 26 00:02:38,410 --> 00:02:45,400 And amongst his books are a comparative history of communism, the red flag, communism and the making of the modern world. 27 00:02:45,400 --> 00:02:54,490 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. 28 00:02:54,490 --> 00:02:58,390 He is, in other words, ideally placed to chair today's discussion. 29 00:02:58,390 --> 00:03:03,100 And so, David, it's with great pleasure that I hand over to you now and disappear in turn from the screen. 30 00:03:03,100 --> 00:03:12,100 Thank you. Thank you very much, Wes, and it's great to be chairing this really discussion, this really interesting book. 31 00:03:12,100 --> 00:03:21,380 And first, I'd like to as well. As I said, the book is extremely topical and very much looking forward to the discussion. 32 00:03:21,380 --> 00:03:26,980 So really, it's just for me to introduce Rahner, who I don't think really needs much introduction. 33 00:03:26,980 --> 00:03:38,350 He is professor of Chinese politics and history at some cross college, has been director of the China Centre kind of study centre. 34 00:03:38,350 --> 00:03:42,550 And his previous publications include A Bitter Revolution, 35 00:03:42,550 --> 00:03:50,140 China's Struggle with the Modern World and forgotten ally China as World War two, 1937 to 45. 36 00:03:50,140 --> 00:04:00,070 So he is an ideal person to be writing and commenting on the U.S. China makes of its wartime history today, 37 00:04:00,070 --> 00:04:11,830 which of course is a very important topic given how difficult Chinese American Western relations and he will be. 38 00:04:11,830 --> 00:04:18,940 I will be making a comment. And and also we're delighted to be joined by Professor Vivian Shu, 39 00:04:18,940 --> 00:04:25,180 who is professor emeritus of Contemporary Chinese Studies and emeritus fellow St. Anthony's College, 40 00:04:25,180 --> 00:04:31,540 and she works on 20th century Chinese state and government techniques. 41 00:04:31,540 --> 00:04:38,260 She publications include The Reach of the State, and she is, of course, 42 00:04:38,260 --> 00:04:47,470 an ideal person to comment on Rhona's analysis of Chinese politics and contemporary politics. 43 00:04:47,470 --> 00:04:56,080 So I'd like to I will be talking more broadly about broader issues, I think, because I'm not a China specialist, 44 00:04:56,080 --> 00:05:02,260 Vivian, I think we'll be talking about the implications for Chinese history. 45 00:05:02,260 --> 00:05:12,010 But I'm delighted to be able to hand over to Rana, who will be reading a section from his book now. 46 00:05:12,010 --> 00:05:16,960 Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, David, and brief, thanks for me, if I may. 47 00:05:16,960 --> 00:05:21,080 Thank you. To the Hotel Myotis and others who have put this together. 48 00:05:21,080 --> 00:05:25,630 Dave, David, Vivienne for being such brilliant commentators. I know that Vivian is having problems with her camera today. 49 00:05:25,630 --> 00:05:31,810 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, 50 00:05:31,810 --> 00:05:36,470 the voice is the key thing, even if we don't get to see Vivian, but the rest of us should be visible. 51 00:05:36,470 --> 00:05:39,740 I hope and thank you to all of you for joining us today. 52 00:05:39,740 --> 00:05:45,820 This lunchtime, I thought I just read the first couple of pages of the book itself, China's Good War, 53 00:05:45,820 --> 00:05:51,730 because it lays out my intention in writing it this way very clearly for the audience, which is not Chinese. 54 00:05:51,730 --> 00:05:58,720 In other words, an audience I see mostly of people from the UK, Oxford in particular, perhaps one or two from outside, 55 00:05:58,720 --> 00:06:06,520 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. 56 00:06:06,520 --> 00:06:16,600 So if I make a couple of pages from the introduction, which is subtitled War, Memory and Nationalism in China. 57 00:06:16,600 --> 00:06:26,980 Some eight decades after its conclusion, the Second World War still grips the imagination of large parts of North America, Europe and Asia. 58 00:06:26,980 --> 00:06:35,590 Tom Brokaw's book, The Greatest Generation from 1998 and Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks is miniseries Band of Brothers from 2001, 59 00:06:35,590 --> 00:06:40,780 captivated American readers and viewers and remain cultural touchstones. 60 00:06:40,780 --> 00:06:45,640 British politicians use metaphors about Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain to describe 61 00:06:45,640 --> 00:06:50,470 the country's decision to exit from the European Union and the sitcom Dad's Army. 62 00:06:50,470 --> 00:06:57,820 Gently teasing the wartime Home Guard still plays on television half a century after it was made. 63 00:06:57,820 --> 00:07:06,520 Japanese automakers produce movies that explore topics that from Homefront suffering to the mentality of kamikaze pilots, 64 00:07:06,520 --> 00:07:13,510 courts in Poland adjudicate the legally correct description of death camps built during the Nazi occupation. 65 00:07:13,510 --> 00:07:20,230 The Second World War is a long way from being all that those societies think about, of course. 66 00:07:20,230 --> 00:07:25,150 But in the United States, Europe, east and west and in Japan, 67 00:07:25,150 --> 00:07:29,380 there is a continuing undercurrent of collective memory about the importance of 68 00:07:29,380 --> 00:07:36,180 that global conflict that doesn't take too much effort to bring to the surface. 69 00:07:36,180 --> 00:07:43,830 Perhaps more surprisingly, the same is true of China when outsiders think of collective memory. 70 00:07:43,830 --> 00:07:48,660 In China, they tend to remember a particular historical moments, many of them traumatic. 71 00:07:48,660 --> 00:07:54,420 The Cultural Revolution or the Opium Wars of the 19th century or the positively the 72 00:07:54,420 --> 00:07:59,850 legacy of traditional Chinese thought may come to mind in the past few decades. 73 00:07:59,850 --> 00:08:05,190 However, memories of another episode have become ever more prominent in China. 74 00:08:05,190 --> 00:08:11,610 The Second World War schoolchildren file by the thousands through the Beijing Museum that 75 00:08:11,610 --> 00:08:17,160 commemorates the war of resistance against Japan as the conflict is known in China, 76 00:08:17,160 --> 00:08:23,040 movies about topics from the massacre of Chinese civilians in Japanese occupied Nanjing 77 00:08:23,040 --> 00:08:30,570 to starvation in a wartime famine in Henan province top the Chinese box office online. 78 00:08:30,570 --> 00:08:35,310 Netizens debate the finer points of the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, 79 00:08:35,310 --> 00:08:44,080 assessing the relative strengths of the Chinese and Japanese troops that lined up against one another by the banks of the river. 80 00:08:44,080 --> 00:08:51,790 One particular moment in 2015 captured the way in which the war has entered the Chinese public sphere with reminders of the past, 81 00:08:51,790 --> 00:09:03,820 used to make points about the future. On 30 September 2015, Tiananmen Square, at the heart of Beijing, was filled by an enormous parade. 82 00:09:03,820 --> 00:09:11,710 Missiles, tanks and marching soldiers all made their way past thousands of spectators from China and abroad. 83 00:09:11,710 --> 00:09:16,120 The event commemorated the 17th anniversary of the end of World War Two. 84 00:09:16,120 --> 00:09:24,850 In Asia, it stood in stark contrast to the elegiac tone of many of the memorials in Europe the preceding spring, 85 00:09:24,850 --> 00:09:32,530 on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945, as on the day the following day, 86 00:09:32,530 --> 00:09:37,560 there was a strong sense that the end of a narrative had been reached. 87 00:09:37,560 --> 00:09:45,790 Veterans and survivors attending a seventieth anniversary in the knowledge that few of them will be there for the 80th. 88 00:09:45,790 --> 00:09:49,630 In China, while veterans stood at the centre of their parade, 89 00:09:49,630 --> 00:09:58,990 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. 90 00:09:58,990 --> 00:10:03,310 And the Chinese event was distinctive in another important way. 91 00:10:03,310 --> 00:10:11,320 The parade was the first national large scale public commemoration of China's role in the Second World War. 92 00:10:11,320 --> 00:10:18,850 It was a major milestone in a process that had been taking place over a long period of time, some 30 years or more, 93 00:10:18,850 --> 00:10:26,650 during which China's attitude towards collective memory of its wartime participation changed significantly with profound 94 00:10:26,650 --> 00:10:34,630 consequences for its domestic and international politics and the consequences of those domestic and international politics. 95 00:10:34,630 --> 00:10:43,390 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. 96 00:10:43,390 --> 00:10:55,590 So, David, can I get back to you? Thank you. 97 00:10:55,590 --> 00:10:59,640 Well, it's a great pleasure to comment on this book, 98 00:10:59,640 --> 00:11:06,840 and I think it's an ideal book for a torch discussion as it I think shows very clearly how 99 00:11:06,840 --> 00:11:12,000 humanity's approaches can cast light on important issues of major contemporary importance, 100 00:11:12,000 --> 00:11:18,870 in this case, Chinese Western relations, because this is a book not just about historiographical debates or any politics, 101 00:11:18,870 --> 00:11:30,360 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. 102 00:11:30,360 --> 00:11:38,130 And as a historian of I'm not a historian of of of Russia, of China, 103 00:11:38,130 --> 00:11:43,080 as a historian of USSR and communism who's made a rather limited efforts to learn Chinese, 104 00:11:43,080 --> 00:11:47,010 I realise how ignorant I am of much of this history and of these debates. 105 00:11:47,010 --> 00:11:51,990 And I think most of us have much less of a sense of Chinese perceptions of history in 106 00:11:51,990 --> 00:11:57,120 foreign affairs than we do about Russian ideas or Soviet perceptions during the Cold War. 107 00:11:57,120 --> 00:12:03,570 And I think this is a book that absolutely should be read by policy makers and informed citizens alike. 108 00:12:03,570 --> 00:12:05,700 Now, as I said, I'm not a China specialist. 109 00:12:05,700 --> 00:12:12,900 I'll comment on some broader issues raised by the book and particularly how China's use of war history in memory has legitimised. 110 00:12:12,900 --> 00:12:19,290 It's used it to legitimise its foreign policy. How that compares with the use of these of history by other states, 111 00:12:19,290 --> 00:12:25,230 what it tells us more generally about the role of history and ideas in international relations, 112 00:12:25,230 --> 00:12:30,420 and how successful China might be in its efforts to use these histories. 113 00:12:30,420 --> 00:12:37,530 Now, the issue of China's so-called soft power that is a set of ideas used to legitimise its global power 114 00:12:37,530 --> 00:12:44,490 has been widely discussed in Western commentary since the 2000s and normally in a rather smug way. 115 00:12:44,490 --> 00:12:49,380 It's often said the Chinese can never really be a real rival to the US in the sense that, 116 00:12:49,380 --> 00:12:56,160 say, the Marxist USSR or even Maoist China was because it lacks soft power. 117 00:12:56,160 --> 00:13:00,900 So, for instance, the argument goes, it set up Confucius Institutes around the world. 118 00:13:00,900 --> 00:13:09,210 But Confucianism only really has resonance in an East Asian cultural context and can never compete with an American liberal vision, 119 00:13:09,210 --> 00:13:13,020 which is about universal values and can appeal across cultures. 120 00:13:13,020 --> 00:13:23,370 And I suppose my assumption was the Chinese use of wartime history and memory had a similarly limited, domestically focussed nationalistic role. 121 00:13:23,370 --> 00:13:27,870 So what was completely novel to me about Rhona's book was his argument that Chinese 122 00:13:27,870 --> 00:13:32,670 policymakers and political commentators are trying to use the war in a universalised, 123 00:13:32,670 --> 00:13:37,200 outwardly focussed way to justify a global role. 124 00:13:37,200 --> 00:13:42,270 That is, they are arguing that the Chinese, like the Americans and the Soviets, 125 00:13:42,270 --> 00:13:48,510 were a vital force in the antifascist struggle during the war in defeating Japan and in bringing a stable, 126 00:13:48,510 --> 00:13:53,970 rules based order to the world, and that this history justifies that what great power status. 127 00:13:53,970 --> 00:14:00,450 Today they're comparing the Japanese with the Nazis, the destruction of the Nanjing massacres and rapes with the Holocaust, 128 00:14:00,450 --> 00:14:07,350 and they're emulating the US in the region who themselves use a universalised antifascist message, i.e., 129 00:14:07,350 --> 00:14:12,570 they're the power that rescued Asia from Japanese militarism and then, of course, from communism. 130 00:14:12,570 --> 00:14:15,720 And I think Rhona's argument raises the important broader question, 131 00:14:15,720 --> 00:14:23,130 which is how non liberal states in the modern world can legitimise their regional or global ambitions. 132 00:14:23,130 --> 00:14:30,720 Clearly, Marxism, Leninism was ideal for this purpose, as it's a universalist ideology about universally social values. 133 00:14:30,720 --> 00:14:39,720 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. 134 00:14:39,720 --> 00:14:48,810 A story of China echoes that of the USSR, which really from the sixties and seventies, but particularly from the Russia in the nineties. 135 00:14:48,810 --> 00:14:59,790 And two thousands moved away from justifying its global role in international revolutionary terms and increasingly moved towards antifascist message, 136 00:14:59,790 --> 00:15:10,770 arguing that it was the power that defeated Hitler. It and it legitimised itself domestically and internationally as an anti fascist power. 137 00:15:10,770 --> 00:15:16,110 And in a sense, this clearly is what China has been trying to do as a runner. 138 00:15:16,110 --> 00:15:24,780 So fascinatingly explains. But as I think the book also shows fascinatingly, this war memory is Janus faced because on the one hand, 139 00:15:24,780 --> 00:15:31,530 in stressing the state's role in saving the world from fascism, it justifies an assertive foreign policy. 140 00:15:31,530 --> 00:15:36,750 In the present, it says to its ambitious elites can say, we are this antifascist power. 141 00:15:36,750 --> 00:15:44,610 We have a global role. On the other hand, popular war memory tends to be rather different because it often focuses on stoical, 142 00:15:44,610 --> 00:15:51,660 ordinary populations that make sacrifices for the common good, and that's not very interested in nationalist assertiveness. 143 00:15:51,660 --> 00:15:53,910 So the UK example, for instance, 144 00:15:53,910 --> 00:16:02,310 is the notion of the blitz spirit and there are Soviet and Ranchos Chinese equivalents and these tends to have much more popular. 145 00:16:02,310 --> 00:16:08,550 These tend to have much more popular resonance and they're not so interested in global issues. 146 00:16:08,550 --> 00:16:14,940 So I think it seems to me that there are advantages and astronomer's singer advantages and disadvantages to elites, 147 00:16:14,940 --> 00:16:24,420 to this double aspect of your memory. War memory can unite elites and the broader population behind the notion of national exceptionalism. 148 00:16:24,420 --> 00:16:28,480 But they have different messages and elites often find the popular. 149 00:16:28,480 --> 00:16:33,280 Memory a bit too isolationist and populist for their own purposes. 150 00:16:33,280 --> 00:16:39,850 So, for instance, if we see if we think of the role of war memory recently in in Britain in Brexit nationalism, 151 00:16:39,850 --> 00:16:47,440 it was the was the populist elements that were there to the fore. This is the sort that that interested in global adventures. 152 00:16:47,440 --> 00:16:50,650 It doesn't desperately want to give foreign aid. 153 00:16:50,650 --> 00:16:58,180 Supporters of global Britain tend to use the myth of a liberal free trade empire rather than a sort of war blitz, 154 00:16:58,180 --> 00:17:02,950 spirit type memory and has run the shows. There is a similar tension in Chinese war memory. 155 00:17:02,950 --> 00:17:06,790 Elites aren't always happy with how it's understood in popular terms. 156 00:17:06,790 --> 00:17:16,330 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. 157 00:17:16,330 --> 00:17:22,570 But actually assertive nationalists didn't like it for celebrating stoicism in defeat and a sense of 158 00:17:22,570 --> 00:17:29,920 victimhood or whereas they wanted a film to a war film to emphasise strength and national assertiveness, 159 00:17:29,920 --> 00:17:36,530 i.e. globalisation. And so I suppose this brings me to the questions I'd like to ask Rana, 160 00:17:36,530 --> 00:17:44,510 which is how long lasting does he think this Chinese good war legitimisation strategy is going to is going to be? 161 00:17:44,510 --> 00:17:51,560 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, 162 00:17:51,560 --> 00:17:58,820 because Westerners are so ignorant of Asian history and in that sense is even less affected than the Russian good war strategy, 163 00:17:58,820 --> 00:18:05,060 which may alienate its immediate neighbours, but actually does have a resonance some residents in the West. 164 00:18:05,060 --> 00:18:13,010 And so I'd like to ask him really, might it be ultimately more rational for China to return to a global legitimisation 165 00:18:13,010 --> 00:18:18,590 strategy more founded on economic development themes rather than antifascist themes, 166 00:18:18,590 --> 00:18:21,260 i.e. a more nationalistic conservative version, 167 00:18:21,260 --> 00:18:26,900 perhaps of the old Marxist Leninism, one that stresses the advantages of the Chinese model of state development, 168 00:18:26,900 --> 00:18:31,910 the power of strong states to do what they like within their own borders without liberal interference. 169 00:18:31,910 --> 00:18:37,760 And whatever happens, it would be interesting to think about whatever course China chooses, 170 00:18:37,760 --> 00:18:44,960 how that's going to interact with a Biden administration that's trying to resuscitate a decaying liberal world order, 171 00:18:44,960 --> 00:18:53,060 which, of course, owes much to Cold War liberal ideas. So thanks very much for those comments. 172 00:18:53,060 --> 00:19:04,730 And I'd like to now hand over to Vivian, who will make it gives some responses from from a China specialist. 173 00:19:04,730 --> 00:19:14,300 OK, thank you, Rana. As you well know, I'm an enthusiastic consumer of historical research, not myself, 174 00:19:14,300 --> 00:19:19,460 like David, a card carrying historian, but for whatever it might be worth. 175 00:19:19,460 --> 00:19:26,840 Let me say that I've read this new book of yours as very much a meta sort of historical exercise. 176 00:19:26,840 --> 00:19:33,110 It teaches us a lot about the history of certain persons, places and events, to be sure. 177 00:19:33,110 --> 00:19:38,870 But the book as a whole seems far more concerned with alerting us to the dodgier 178 00:19:38,870 --> 00:19:45,080 or the more unsafe and inconstant qualities of what we receive as history, 179 00:19:45,080 --> 00:19:46,370 which is to say, 180 00:19:46,370 --> 00:19:57,500 concerned with sensitising readers to the layer cake of knowledge is that are comprised in what we believe our national histories to be. 181 00:19:57,500 --> 00:20:06,620 You shall hear not only have the national histories we moderns receive are sifted and hammered into very particular shapes from the outset. 182 00:20:06,620 --> 00:20:18,350 But how also, even once broadly accepted, certain collective understandings may later be repressed or just forgotten, and how even later, parts, 183 00:20:18,350 --> 00:20:23,720 at least of once discarded understandings, may yet again be recovered, 184 00:20:23,720 --> 00:20:33,530 reimagined and repurposed to meet evolving social goals to operationalise this matter agenda. 185 00:20:33,530 --> 00:20:42,470 In the book, you deploy your very interesting concept of circuits of memory, alluding to several different circuits where the war is concerned, 186 00:20:42,470 --> 00:20:46,520 one that spans the U.K., the U.S. and Canada, 187 00:20:46,520 --> 00:20:54,140 one reaching across Russia and some of its neighbouring countries, one in Japan and quite another in China. 188 00:20:54,140 --> 00:20:55,910 And though you don't discuss any others, 189 00:20:55,910 --> 00:21:03,860 I think we might imagine there may be further such circuits of memory and play over portions of Southeast Asia, 190 00:21:03,860 --> 00:21:14,410 for example, or over states that managed to remain neutral throughout the war and also perhaps over different parts of North Africa. 191 00:21:14,410 --> 00:21:18,970 The work documents why and how, since the 1980s, 192 00:21:18,970 --> 00:21:28,990 Chinese authorities and other influencers have been so intently bent on collecting and revising national memories of that war, 193 00:21:28,990 --> 00:21:36,940 projecting reworked historical reminiscences of the nation's struggle and re-evaluations 194 00:21:36,940 --> 00:21:44,230 of China's importance in the overall war effort to audiences at home and abroad. 195 00:21:44,230 --> 00:21:52,930 You make it clear that while this concerted effort at RE remembering has been greeted warmly and largely successful at home, 196 00:21:52,930 --> 00:21:57,550 it's meant a much cooler, more diffident reaction around the world. 197 00:21:57,550 --> 00:22:05,470 And while I think we can pretty quickly see why foreign audiences might well be largely unaware or unimpressed, 198 00:22:05,470 --> 00:22:09,970 I think the first question I'd want to put to you would be about just why you 199 00:22:09,970 --> 00:22:17,140 think it is that this effort has met with such broad receptivity at home. 200 00:22:17,140 --> 00:22:22,600 Because the deeper question I'd really like to get at concerns the way you've chosen here, 201 00:22:22,600 --> 00:22:34,300 to represent the accretion of all those other Chinese national memories very painfully acquired during all those long years before the 1980s. 202 00:22:34,300 --> 00:22:39,160 Would you bracket together under the heading of China's Cold War? 203 00:22:39,160 --> 00:22:44,080 And I ask about this because what I felt almost went missing entirely or was 204 00:22:44,080 --> 00:22:50,410 made invisible beneath this label of the Cold War was the impact of the Chinese 205 00:22:50,410 --> 00:22:56,890 people's repeated and desperately raw and socially exhausting collective experience 206 00:22:56,890 --> 00:23:02,320 of another kind of struggle over identity during those four Cold War decades. 207 00:23:02,320 --> 00:23:08,080 That being, of course, the continuous struggle over class identity. 208 00:23:08,080 --> 00:23:16,060 My question, in short, I think, is whether or not you would agree that in China up until the 1980s, 209 00:23:16,060 --> 00:23:21,250 for as long as class identity was determinative of one's social worth, 210 00:23:21,250 --> 00:23:30,970 prospects and allegiances, questions of national historical identity simply carried far less violence in domestic affairs or for that matter, 211 00:23:30,970 --> 00:23:40,750 in China's international affairs. And so only after the preoccupations of continuous class struggle were finally set aside. 212 00:23:40,750 --> 00:23:45,040 Would a serious effort to reconstruct a cross-class, common, 213 00:23:45,040 --> 00:23:51,910 shared national identity and to resituated that identity explicitly in the war experience. 214 00:23:51,910 --> 00:23:57,490 Would that have any purchase in Chinese political life? 215 00:23:57,490 --> 00:24:03,310 And the second topic on which I'd like to draw you out if I can, concerns 1989, 216 00:24:03,310 --> 00:24:11,590 especially the post Tiananmen Square crackdown and a possible connexion I think I see between that crisis and the 217 00:24:11,590 --> 00:24:21,040 parties project of reclaiming the war experience as just the right new historical anchor for national identity. 218 00:24:21,040 --> 00:24:31,300 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. 219 00:24:31,300 --> 00:24:40,240 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. 220 00:24:40,240 --> 00:24:47,140 And one of the things going on everywhere just then was an immense proliferation of colour televisions, 221 00:24:47,140 --> 00:24:50,470 not just in big cities, but small towns and rural areas. 222 00:24:50,470 --> 00:25:00,760 To this sudden abundance of affordable TV sets created huge demand and a rapt audience for new nightly programming. 223 00:25:00,760 --> 00:25:07,960 And what I saw being broadcast on TV then was what seemed to be just an endless stream of serialised dramas, 224 00:25:07,960 --> 00:25:20,440 almost all set precisely during the war and very, very much featuring the People's Army officers and soldiers and sometimes their extended families. 225 00:25:20,440 --> 00:25:26,710 These could be melodramatic at times, but they certainly weren't light or frivolous entertainment. 226 00:25:26,710 --> 00:25:33,040 And I did not find them morally simplistic either. Not cowboys and Indians types of fare. 227 00:25:33,040 --> 00:25:40,000 They tended, I thought at the time, to have complex anguishing plots, often involving spies, 228 00:25:40,000 --> 00:25:47,620 informers, other tangled and ambiguous social realities and highly fraught human relations. 229 00:25:47,620 --> 00:25:55,840 Even amongst those fighting on the same side, those dramas, especially on life and death risks, 230 00:25:55,840 --> 00:26:05,290 on facing fear and finding courage, watching them evidentally wildly popular as they were watching those series. 231 00:26:05,290 --> 00:26:09,310 Then in the Post and on political moment, 232 00:26:09,310 --> 00:26:17,620 I interpreted them primarily as part of a project of urgent damage control and image rebuilding for the play, 233 00:26:17,620 --> 00:26:27,820 whose standing had been so badly shaken after the violent suppression of the protests, dramatising historical memories of Army service. 234 00:26:27,820 --> 00:26:39,490 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. 235 00:26:39,490 --> 00:26:47,890 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 236 00:26:47,890 --> 00:26:58,150 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, 237 00:26:58,150 --> 00:27:08,190 which in turn would press party state leaders further and further forward with refocusing the national public culture around. 238 00:27:08,190 --> 00:27:19,720 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. 239 00:27:19,720 --> 00:27:21,940 Well, I did have a third question, 240 00:27:21,940 --> 00:27:32,050 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. 241 00:27:32,050 --> 00:27:40,810 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. 242 00:27:40,810 --> 00:27:48,520 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. 243 00:27:48,520 --> 00:27:55,180 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, 244 00:27:55,180 --> 00:28:00,340 because actually, in some ways, I think they relate to each other really in some quite interesting ways, not least, 245 00:28:00,340 --> 00:28:05,620 for instance, in David's bringing up the immensely important subject of Marxism, Leninism, 246 00:28:05,620 --> 00:28:13,090 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. 247 00:28:13,090 --> 00:28:16,960 Very insightful question about class and where that was and where it goes. 248 00:28:16,960 --> 00:28:22,630 Another under examined but actually very relevant topic. 249 00:28:22,630 --> 00:28:28,510 So let me try and come back with a couple of of thoughts. 250 00:28:28,510 --> 00:28:36,490 The first one is to do with David's question about the durability of this phenomenon of China becoming obsessed with World War Two. 251 00:28:36,490 --> 00:28:39,730 How lasting is it and where does it make a difference? 252 00:28:39,730 --> 00:28:44,860 Well, I think, first of all, I mean, I clearly can't give a definitive answer to that that question. 253 00:28:44,860 --> 00:28:49,930 But what I can point out and do point out in the book is that this iteration, in other words, 254 00:28:49,930 --> 00:28:59,350 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. 255 00:28:59,350 --> 00:29:06,910 It's emerged in its modern form in the early 1980s. So as Villon says before Tiananmen Square, but certainly in that reform era, 256 00:29:06,910 --> 00:29:12,280 and it continues to reshape itself in all sorts of very vibrant ways today. 257 00:29:12,280 --> 00:29:18,670 So just to give a couple of quick examples of how it's relevant in the contemporary sphere, 258 00:29:18,670 --> 00:29:26,320 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. 259 00:29:26,320 --> 00:29:35,440 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, 260 00:29:35,440 --> 00:29:38,590 people's war against the virus, which, of course, is a good Maoist phrase. 261 00:29:38,590 --> 00:29:49,840 It's a phrase that absolutely comes from those years of Japanese conflict, conflict with Japan against the invasion of the 1930s and 1940s, 262 00:29:49,840 --> 00:29:56,830 or another example, the repeated use by Xi Jinping and onea the foreign minister of China. 263 00:29:56,830 --> 00:30:01,030 So the president and foreign minister, no less, not just once, but on many occasions. 264 00:30:01,030 --> 00:30:05,920 But one that comes to mind was, say, the Munich Security Conference last year, big international gathering. 265 00:30:05,920 --> 00:30:11,590 The U.S. secretary of state at the time, Mike Pompeo, was there. Mike Esposa, then defence secretary was there. 266 00:30:11,590 --> 00:30:19,930 What was the analogy? Which one you used to speak to these opponents, you might say, in the hall. 267 00:30:19,930 --> 00:30:28,510 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, 268 00:30:28,510 --> 00:30:39,190 Europe, actually, at that point at that moment, China was not just a signatory, but the first signatory to the United Nations charter. 269 00:30:39,190 --> 00:30:46,420 In other words, laying claim to China as a founding member of the post 1945 international order, 270 00:30:46,420 --> 00:30:51,310 something that was a direct consequence of Chinese contribution to to World War Two. 271 00:30:51,310 --> 00:30:55,870 But that also enables me to give a third example, which also goes to David's second question. 272 00:30:55,870 --> 00:31:00,760 If I could we them together in this way, which is the question of. 273 00:31:00,760 --> 00:31:07,330 When certain aspects of this idea of World War Two being this immensely important time 274 00:31:07,330 --> 00:31:14,140 for China are suitable to bring up and when they get covered over or suppressed. 275 00:31:14,140 --> 00:31:17,290 And just a quick reminder, I think not been said yet, 276 00:31:17,290 --> 00:31:23,140 and I think we should also remember that those are not specialists were able to in China was a very serious set of events, 277 00:31:23,140 --> 00:31:32,770 over 10 million dead, nearly 100 million refugees and destruction of most of China's infrastructures, railways, its roads, all of that. 278 00:31:32,770 --> 00:31:34,360 And by no means, incidentally, 279 00:31:34,360 --> 00:31:41,810 holding down more than half a million Japanese troops between 1937 when the war broke out in 1941 and Pearl Harbour until the Americans, 280 00:31:41,810 --> 00:31:49,810 the British came along. So, you know, the Chinese contribution is not pivotal in the way that the Russian one, Soviet one certainly was. 281 00:31:49,810 --> 00:31:54,610 But nonetheless, it was immensely important in terms of the first phase of that war in in Asia. 282 00:31:54,610 --> 00:31:58,360 And I think it shouldn't be underestimated. The Chinese certainly don't underestimate. 283 00:31:58,360 --> 00:32:04,030 So in that sense, I think very interesting and indicative of something else that happened last year, 2020, 284 00:32:04,030 --> 00:32:13,240 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. 285 00:32:13,240 --> 00:32:16,720 It was released and shows Chinese film released in China. To be honest, 286 00:32:16,720 --> 00:32:23,200 Chinese from the only country in the world that had its cinematic instruments to 2020 because of the rather robust 287 00:32:23,200 --> 00:32:28,480 way in which they locked down the country after the pandemics and cinemas were opened again from the summer. 288 00:32:28,480 --> 00:32:32,530 So perhaps to the breaking box office records globally was was easier for China last year. 289 00:32:32,530 --> 00:32:37,470 But this was done not to get to to make the 300 million US dollars at the box office. 290 00:32:37,470 --> 00:32:41,230 So this is serious, seriously successful film. And the topic was the last. 291 00:32:41,230 --> 00:32:48,400 And a small regiment of Chinese soldiers in 1937 fighting the Japanese in Shanghai in the first phase of Japanese invasion. 292 00:32:48,400 --> 00:32:52,570 But these soldiers were not members of the Chinese communist armies. 293 00:32:52,570 --> 00:32:56,440 They were members of the Chinese nationalist Guomindang Clementine. 294 00:32:56,440 --> 00:33:07,090 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. 295 00:33:07,090 --> 00:33:09,880 This was a movie version of that. Now, as I say, 296 00:33:09,880 --> 00:33:16,900 this is very interesting because to actually have the party that was essentially the ultimate opponent of the communists in the civil war, 297 00:33:16,900 --> 00:33:25,000 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. 298 00:33:25,000 --> 00:33:25,390 I mentioned, 299 00:33:25,390 --> 00:33:35,110 which is a sort of slow rehabilitation of at least parts of the old Chiang Kai-Shek nationalist movement and their battle against Japanese, 300 00:33:35,110 --> 00:33:40,840 which the communists never used to rate at all. But now actually do give a sort of grudgingly patriotic Catala. 301 00:33:40,840 --> 00:33:47,620 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, 302 00:33:47,620 --> 00:33:54,790 which was about to be a big blockbuster hit, had been banned, completely banned in China just before it was supposed to be released. 303 00:33:54,790 --> 00:33:58,270 And the reason for the difference, the difference a year makes was in 2013, 304 00:33:58,270 --> 00:34:04,690 it was the seventh anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China that was made clear by communist sources that 305 00:34:04,690 --> 00:34:11,800 there was no way that a film celebrating the nationalist war effort could be released in a year of import to the Communist Party. 306 00:34:11,800 --> 00:34:17,320 Last year, 2020 was different. That was 75 years of V-J Day since the defeat of Japan. 307 00:34:17,320 --> 00:34:22,480 So it was actually permitted in that sense for the release that shows the sort of malleability 308 00:34:22,480 --> 00:34:27,400 and the changeability of when parts of the world multistorey can be politically useful in China. 309 00:34:27,400 --> 00:34:33,700 And when they step back from the historical front line, as you might, as you might say, 310 00:34:33,700 --> 00:34:36,910 as we go on in conversation with a couple of similarities and differences in Russia 311 00:34:36,910 --> 00:34:40,690 in terms of the way that they talk about the Great Patriotic War in popular culture, 312 00:34:40,690 --> 00:34:48,490 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. 313 00:34:48,490 --> 00:34:55,570 I think it is absolutely right that after 1989, the rehabilitation, particularly of the eight through me, 314 00:34:55,570 --> 00:35:01,330 the new fourth army, the major communist armies in China, which had fought against the Japanese, 315 00:35:01,330 --> 00:35:06,490 was part of, as you say, a sort of trauma management trauma recovery from the Army's point of view, 316 00:35:06,490 --> 00:35:15,460 having basically been sent into fire and fire on and kill large numbers of Chinese civilians on June 4th, 1989. 317 00:35:15,460 --> 00:35:21,430 But the process itself was and has been a longer one. Rehabilitation of those wartime stories, not just communists, 318 00:35:21,430 --> 00:35:29,200 but also nationalists fighting the Japanese began in the early 1980s and essentially continued apace ever since. 319 00:35:29,200 --> 00:35:34,150 And that in that sense and therefore it comes to the question, as you pointed out, 320 00:35:34,150 --> 00:35:46,110 of where did the previous discourse with discourse of class in particular really emerge as part of that wider sense of struggle over identity, 321 00:35:46,110 --> 00:35:50,260 an attempt to try and kind of forge some new sense of place to be? 322 00:35:50,260 --> 00:35:54,700 Well, I have to say, I think the answer I would give to that, judging by what one sees, 323 00:35:54,700 --> 00:36:00,270 by the way, in which the Second World War is presented, is that there is an increasingly urgent. 324 00:36:00,270 --> 00:36:04,350 You see on the part of the Communist Party in the 80s, 90s, 325 00:36:04,350 --> 00:36:11,970 2000s to get away from that kind of class discourse to instead provide this kind of unifying national idea, 326 00:36:11,970 --> 00:36:19,980 which actually sort of almost sort of skirts over the class differences that remain very real during the wartime years. 327 00:36:19,980 --> 00:36:27,390 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. 328 00:36:27,390 --> 00:36:29,430 In recent years in China, 329 00:36:29,430 --> 00:36:37,200 a young Chinese Marxist groups based off of the major university like Peking University who've taken the party's rhetoric of class 330 00:36:37,200 --> 00:36:45,180 struggle for the past seriously and have attempted things like organising trade union workers in Chinese factories and farms, 331 00:36:45,180 --> 00:36:53,100 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. 332 00:36:53,100 --> 00:36:57,240 So we have come to an ironic world. I think it's ironic anyway, 333 00:36:57,240 --> 00:37:06,360 in the early 20s in China by which major film makers essentially glorifying the wartime activities of Chiang Kai-Shek, the former, 334 00:37:06,360 --> 00:37:09,540 you know, deadly enemy of Chairman Mao, 335 00:37:09,540 --> 00:37:15,750 and putting that on the screen for millions of people to watch and buy tickets while eating popcorn, that's fine. 336 00:37:15,750 --> 00:37:23,040 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, 337 00:37:23,040 --> 00:37:31,590 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. 338 00:37:31,590 --> 00:37:37,510 And if that is not an irony of the present day, I don't know what is. 339 00:37:37,510 --> 00:37:50,430 David. I think you're on mutual. 340 00:37:50,430 --> 00:37:54,180 Yes, thank you. 341 00:37:54,180 --> 00:38:02,850 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, 342 00:38:02,850 --> 00:38:06,720 the Russians have been trying to stop the Soviets, 343 00:38:06,720 --> 00:38:17,910 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. 344 00:38:17,910 --> 00:38:22,590 And they've been doing it for a long time and it's become even more intense. 345 00:38:22,590 --> 00:38:28,950 And so, yeah, the parallels with the with the Chinese example are absolutely fascinating. 346 00:38:28,950 --> 00:38:36,930 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. 347 00:38:36,930 --> 00:38:43,200 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, 348 00:38:43,200 --> 00:38:48,030 because, of course, you put forward the idea and I think rightly, 349 00:38:48,030 --> 00:38:58,830 that class is immensely important factor in shaping the 19 late 1940s, up to the 1980s, the way that China thought about itself. 350 00:38:58,830 --> 00:39:04,020 But of course, class itself at that time was a very, very changeable sort of identity. 351 00:39:04,020 --> 00:39:08,850 I mean, ideas of class during the Cultural Revolution and certainly before that in China became essentially hereditary. 352 00:39:08,850 --> 00:39:14,940 The sense that you inherited your your parents class status in a way that wasn't true previously. 353 00:39:14,940 --> 00:39:20,070 And linked to that, I would also sort of suggest that I think nationalist ideas, 354 00:39:20,070 --> 00:39:25,680 ideas or ideas of China is the sort of nation state that fought that was still very powerful during that time. 355 00:39:25,680 --> 00:39:31,200 The son of Japanese war was talked about, of course, under Mao, but it was talked about in very limited ways, essentially, 356 00:39:31,200 --> 00:39:37,920 as the Chinese Communist Party may be the only leading force that had anything relevant to say about fighting the Japanese. 357 00:39:37,920 --> 00:39:41,970 So that meant that the nationalists were left out of the going down, the Americans were left out of it. 358 00:39:41,970 --> 00:39:48,900 The British indeed were left out of it. And in that sense, it was a political discourse rather than an idea, 359 00:39:48,900 --> 00:39:54,150 rather than an analytical discourse about what had happened during those wartime years. 360 00:39:54,150 --> 00:40:03,770 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. 361 00:40:03,770 --> 00:40:12,400 Well, I think. I'm surprised to hear you say that you think that class was a somewhat mutable concept, 362 00:40:12,400 --> 00:40:19,270 it was really quite fixed in people's lives and as you said, it was something that was inherited. 363 00:40:19,270 --> 00:40:20,050 You are right. 364 00:40:20,050 --> 00:40:32,290 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. 365 00:40:32,290 --> 00:40:39,760 And if you were a technically assigned class and if you were able to demonstrate in the 366 00:40:39,760 --> 00:40:45,730 appropriate ways that your cost standpoint was really progressive and really revolutionary, 367 00:40:45,730 --> 00:40:54,580 then you could make some inroads. But the inescapable oddity of your of your class assignment was very great. 368 00:40:54,580 --> 00:41:03,520 I think I remember quite clearly that although it was first put forward in 1978, that class labels could be lifted. 369 00:41:03,520 --> 00:41:15,220 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 370 00:41:15,220 --> 00:41:24,220 equally citizens and more equally entitled to their political opinions and standpoints. 371 00:41:24,220 --> 00:41:29,770 I just say on that very because the audience I think I expressed myself badly, so badly. 372 00:41:29,770 --> 00:41:37,240 I think you're absolutely right or what you say. But changeable was that prior to the establishment of what became the Maoist order, 373 00:41:37,240 --> 00:41:42,820 I think the ways in which Chinese political thinkers tend to think about class related to categories that, 374 00:41:42,820 --> 00:41:49,330 say European Marxist thinkers would have recognised quite clearly off that point, exactly as you say, 375 00:41:49,330 --> 00:41:54,910 class took on various types of very fixed form, particularly, as I say, the heritability of class, 376 00:41:54,910 --> 00:41:57,760 which, for example, has been writing about quite interestingly recently, 377 00:41:57,760 --> 00:42:04,570 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. 378 00:42:04,570 --> 00:42:07,570 But in terms of mutability during the Mao period, you're actually right. 379 00:42:07,570 --> 00:42:11,590 Of course, it stays very, very fixed and it's very difficult to get out of your class status. 380 00:42:11,590 --> 00:42:16,930 It's not movable between statuses at all in many cases. Hmm. 381 00:42:16,930 --> 00:42:21,730 I suppose perhaps I could just come back on this question about. 382 00:42:21,730 --> 00:42:29,830 So you've been talking with Vivien about the domestic implications of the war myth and clearly it's extremely popular. 383 00:42:29,830 --> 00:42:35,320 But in your book, you also talk about the ways in which the Chinese feel very miffed, really, 384 00:42:35,320 --> 00:42:42,310 that the international community don't really take this war effort seriously and they should be taken as seriously as, say, 385 00:42:42,310 --> 00:42:46,060 the Americans and Russians in the war, which I mean, no one can entirely understand that view, 386 00:42:46,060 --> 00:42:51,820 but that that isn't a view that others do hold because they're so ignorant, 387 00:42:51,820 --> 00:42:54,970 I suppose, and the Americans have been so good to the Americans and the Soviets. 388 00:42:54,970 --> 00:42:59,980 The Russians have been much better at promoting their own their own war stories internationally. 389 00:42:59,980 --> 00:43:06,850 So I'm just wondering how I mean, what how are Chinese leaders going to see this, 390 00:43:06,850 --> 00:43:14,830 the role of this war memory as a as a tool of international policy, of global policy in the longer term? 391 00:43:14,830 --> 00:43:18,910 I mean, for instance, presumably it has a resonance in Asia. 392 00:43:18,910 --> 00:43:26,260 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. 393 00:43:26,260 --> 00:43:30,220 They're going to be much presumably it is against the sort of Maoist background, 394 00:43:30,220 --> 00:43:38,320 the links that were established in the Maoist period or these sort of ideas of China having an ideal development model. 395 00:43:38,320 --> 00:43:45,790 That's going to be the the message that's going to have some resonance rather than some war history. 396 00:43:45,790 --> 00:43:56,080 Or if I may throw in one other alternative possibility, though, that could be the image of China's much earlier history, 397 00:43:56,080 --> 00:44:03,550 its imperial history and its its imperial grandeur and the naturalness of its being 398 00:44:03,550 --> 00:44:12,670 a big country with a huge area of influence over Asia and now even maybe farther. 399 00:44:12,670 --> 00:44:16,840 In other words, joining with David and wondering whether in a sense, 400 00:44:16,840 --> 00:44:25,960 what you've documented in this book was a trip that the remembering of the war was a very important transitional phase. 401 00:44:25,960 --> 00:44:34,630 But going on and finding an even deeper vocabulary and image and memory of history may turn 402 00:44:34,630 --> 00:44:42,610 out to be the next phase that we're looking at with China's increasingly under Xi Jinping, 403 00:44:42,610 --> 00:44:52,450 apparently especially increasingly determined recollection of the grandeur of its own imperial past. 404 00:44:52,450 --> 00:44:56,050 Yeah. So let me put those two together, because I think they dovetail very, very nicely. 405 00:44:56,050 --> 00:45:00,100 And I think that they both really important point on the head. 406 00:45:00,100 --> 00:45:05,710 I think the key thing to remember is that none of these things are either or that they're not Zero-Sum. 407 00:45:05,710 --> 00:45:09,230 And I think that's what a. The ways we sometimes when we're looking at this very, 408 00:45:09,230 --> 00:45:15,560 very complex way in which China is presenting itself both within its own society and to the outside world, 409 00:45:15,560 --> 00:45:24,170 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, 410 00:45:24,170 --> 00:45:29,120 China is really kind of reasserting its old imperial power or that China is, 411 00:45:29,120 --> 00:45:33,080 you know, really just interested in economics as if any of these things were exclusive to the other. 412 00:45:33,080 --> 00:45:37,730 And of course, the point is that all of these things are actually part of a much more complex mixture. 413 00:45:37,730 --> 00:45:40,940 So I would sort of take over my fingers, 414 00:45:40,940 --> 00:45:48,110 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, 415 00:45:48,110 --> 00:45:54,770 both at home and in the world, brings together a variety of different messages. 416 00:45:54,770 --> 00:45:58,070 And it seems to be some of the most important following in a. 417 00:45:58,070 --> 00:46:01,070 Number one is about modern history. And you're actually right, David. 418 00:46:01,070 --> 00:46:05,300 I mean, it has just much more resonance in certain parts of the world than others, even in Asia. 419 00:46:05,300 --> 00:46:12,740 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, 420 00:46:12,740 --> 00:46:22,380 which can be mentioned because of essentially the American domination of Western Europe and Soviet domination of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, 421 00:46:22,380 --> 00:46:26,120 which one of the reasons I think the Cold War is it is important you have a sort of 422 00:46:26,120 --> 00:46:31,610 united set of assumptions and beliefs about what the war time period actually meant. 423 00:46:31,610 --> 00:46:35,150 There was never really true in Asia because everything sped up so fast. 424 00:46:35,150 --> 00:46:37,340 The Japanese thought the Japanese about the war. 425 00:46:37,340 --> 00:46:42,560 Most parts of Southeast Asia were too busy fighting for own freedom in the 40s, 50s and 60s and used it all differently. 426 00:46:42,560 --> 00:46:48,800 In China itself, of course, was largely isolated from from from neighbours in that in that sense, 427 00:46:48,800 --> 00:46:53,060 the chance for a kind of collective understanding of the wartime history was less. 428 00:46:53,060 --> 00:46:56,840 But nonetheless, even within China itself, as I indicated in the book, 429 00:46:56,840 --> 00:47:00,290 I think that the remembering of World War Two is this traumatic event that 430 00:47:00,290 --> 00:47:05,510 brought people together and yet somehow set the country apart is very important. 431 00:47:05,510 --> 00:47:07,170 Also, of course, the Opium Wars, 432 00:47:07,170 --> 00:47:13,970 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, 433 00:47:13,970 --> 00:47:16,310 not least because in China it's not called Korean War. 434 00:47:16,310 --> 00:47:23,120 It's called cuney, the anti-American resistance to America, which has a particular contemporary vibe. 435 00:47:23,120 --> 00:47:28,850 But aside from modern history, you know, the economist Dick argument is important. The idea of rising living standards and all of that. 436 00:47:28,850 --> 00:47:36,410 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 437 00:47:36,410 --> 00:47:40,550 essentially the Soviets got this wrong and we got this we got this right. 438 00:47:40,550 --> 00:47:47,030 Then, of course, what they mentioned, which is the kind of much more premodern imperial system of understanding. 439 00:47:47,030 --> 00:47:53,270 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, 440 00:47:53,270 --> 00:47:58,280 which is to talk in this very kind of bland way about Chinese wisdom and Chinese wisdom is 441 00:47:58,280 --> 00:48:02,570 basically we are talking about premodern philosophy and the worldview that goes with it. 442 00:48:02,570 --> 00:48:09,470 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 443 00:48:09,470 --> 00:48:13,160 and also one that won't frighten the horses when it kind of appears in the world. 444 00:48:13,160 --> 00:48:19,550 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, 445 00:48:19,550 --> 00:48:27,410 because ideas such as Ren Benevolence, which has a very clear Confucian ring to it, are being repurposed for the for the contemporary world. 446 00:48:27,410 --> 00:48:35,090 And the final one is, I think, the sort of wider sense that you see for the Bellefleur initiative of authoritarian developmentalism. 447 00:48:35,090 --> 00:48:41,000 Both of these things are important, not authoritarian, I think, in the sense that China is trying to create many Chinas everywhere. 448 00:48:41,000 --> 00:48:44,240 I really think it's not doing that and couldn't even if it wanted to. 449 00:48:44,240 --> 00:48:54,230 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 450 00:48:54,230 --> 00:49:01,070 the Chinese behind that they were quite happy with San Suu Kyi to whom they were very close and who was elected pretty freely. 451 00:49:01,070 --> 00:49:07,550 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. 452 00:49:07,550 --> 00:49:13,220 So I think you might say authoritarian, tolerant in that sense. But linked to it is this very strong idea of developmentalism. 453 00:49:13,220 --> 00:49:19,820 The idea of actually collective economic good is where the action is, and that's where Ethiopia comes in. 454 00:49:19,820 --> 00:49:28,400 And the final part and again, this brings in both Évian and David, is that China is much more will put it to relax, 455 00:49:28,400 --> 00:49:32,060 is not the right weapon enthusiastic perhaps to talk about itself as a Marxist, 456 00:49:32,060 --> 00:49:38,840 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 457 00:49:38,840 --> 00:49:46,370 theoretical journals like to assure the continued use of terms which any good Hegelian will understand from terms of dialectic, 458 00:49:46,370 --> 00:49:49,220 biltong, struggle, modern contradiction, 459 00:49:49,220 --> 00:49:55,850 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. 460 00:49:55,850 --> 00:49:59,420 But, you know, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, a much keener to talk about, 461 00:49:59,420 --> 00:50:06,490 particularly Hu about a harmonious society, the sort of Confucian commonality rather than the dialectic. 462 00:50:06,490 --> 00:50:09,880 I have a sense that she, Jinping, has been idolised in many, many ways, 463 00:50:09,880 --> 00:50:15,460 but the idea that actually it's much less embarrassed about being seen as openly Marxist Leninist, 464 00:50:15,460 --> 00:50:21,730 I think is one quite significant, if not change, at least ideological shift direction at all. 465 00:50:21,730 --> 00:50:26,890 Four or five of those factors are bubbling away in China today. 466 00:50:26,890 --> 00:50:32,980 Some of them had much more purchase at home. I think probably the wartime language is more powerful within China than it is outside. 467 00:50:32,980 --> 00:50:37,810 Some have more purchased overseas. And that's where the developmentalist side, I think, comes in. 468 00:50:37,810 --> 00:50:43,180 I think it'll be extremely interesting to see whether the Marxist Leninist end of things actually has any 469 00:50:43,180 --> 00:50:48,890 external purchase on the grounds that if China wishes to present itself to the wider world as a Marxist, 470 00:50:48,890 --> 00:50:53,830 then the state would have succeeded and produced, you know, I think was Lenin who said, well, actually, 471 00:50:53,830 --> 00:51:00,160 I was convinced, as we said, that at some point the Bolshevik state would have public toilets made of gold. 472 00:51:00,160 --> 00:51:02,590 Well, that is not something that has yet happened in China. 473 00:51:02,590 --> 00:51:08,590 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. 474 00:51:08,590 --> 00:51:13,660 So maybe there is a sense in which they will sort of rip off the veil and be much less embarrassed about saying, 475 00:51:13,660 --> 00:51:20,620 you know what, we Marxists and we're successful Marxist, Leninists, and we're successful that it is deal with it world. 476 00:51:20,620 --> 00:51:28,890 If so, that would be, I think, an extraordinarily interesting, a slightly unnerving sort of dialogic encounter. 477 00:51:28,890 --> 00:51:38,220 Yeah, so I think, yes, perhaps open up to questions from the audience. 478 00:51:38,220 --> 00:51:46,890 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. 479 00:51:46,890 --> 00:51:50,310 So I would hope that others might come in with them as we go. 480 00:51:50,310 --> 00:51:54,630 And in some sense, you may have answered this already run up. 481 00:51:54,630 --> 00:51:55,890 But the question is, 482 00:51:55,890 --> 00:52:06,090 how successfully does the Chinese state rationalise away the major contribution of the nationalist movement when promoting its new war history? 483 00:52:06,090 --> 00:52:12,990 And I suppose I, having listened to the discussion and some of what both David and Fabian have said, 484 00:52:12,990 --> 00:52:22,200 I wonder if you might think about that also in relation to what what are we saying when we're saying China these days? 485 00:52:22,200 --> 00:52:27,620 Because I'm struck that David is sort of moving between Russia and the Soviets at various points in your explanation? 486 00:52:27,620 --> 00:52:37,350 And understandably so. And of course, you know, who or what is China in relation to this new narrative that you're putting forward? 487 00:52:37,350 --> 00:52:41,880 Might be an interesting might be one of the things behind that question, perhaps, as well. 488 00:52:41,880 --> 00:52:48,150 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. 489 00:52:48,150 --> 00:52:50,180 And it can be answered in many different ways. 490 00:52:50,180 --> 00:52:58,260 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. 491 00:52:58,260 --> 00:53:05,580 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, 492 00:53:05,580 --> 00:53:13,200 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. 493 00:53:13,200 --> 00:53:16,020 Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Simple has become very central, 494 00:53:16,020 --> 00:53:21,690 but it's also simultaneously pushing much more strongly than it ever did before about the idea of 495 00:53:21,690 --> 00:53:27,960 overseas Chinese or Chinese diaspora as being part of a kind of wider understanding of what China is. 496 00:53:27,960 --> 00:53:35,850 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, 497 00:53:35,850 --> 00:53:41,280 is that they haven't yet worked out any very convincing way to get the plurality 498 00:53:41,280 --> 00:53:46,140 of all those different Chinese into their definition of central China is. 499 00:53:46,140 --> 00:53:50,730 So in other words, you think about the Taiwan question as the starting point for Beijing is, 500 00:53:50,730 --> 00:53:54,460 look, Taiwan has always been part of China geographically and otherwise. 501 00:53:54,460 --> 00:53:56,880 It has to come back whether it wants to or not. 502 00:53:56,880 --> 00:54:02,070 But the question of what that means for Chinese identity, if you're saying, look, these people aren't Taiwanese, whatever that means, 503 00:54:02,070 --> 00:54:08,220 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? 504 00:54:08,220 --> 00:54:16,200 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? 505 00:54:16,200 --> 00:54:19,380 Nonetheless, think of themselves clearly, 506 00:54:19,380 --> 00:54:26,220 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. 507 00:54:26,220 --> 00:54:31,470 How does that fit into the discourse on that? At the moment, there seems to be really a sort of deafening silence. 508 00:54:31,470 --> 00:54:36,300 So I think resolving that question of identity and that's where actually things like World War Two, 509 00:54:36,300 --> 00:54:43,110 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 510 00:54:43,110 --> 00:54:51,690 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. 511 00:54:51,690 --> 00:54:59,700 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. 512 00:54:59,700 --> 00:55:05,580 And I thank you and I wonder if I was struck by Vivian's notion that this there's also the sort 513 00:55:05,580 --> 00:55:14,490 of imperial past that's being in both invoked and and sort of at the same time set aside here. 514 00:55:14,490 --> 00:55:24,210 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? 515 00:55:24,210 --> 00:55:27,750 Because there's internal imperialism as well, of course, as well as external imperialism. 516 00:55:27,750 --> 00:55:36,400 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. 517 00:55:36,400 --> 00:55:42,630 Yes. I mean, yes, broadly, really, in relation to the sort of good war story, in a sense, 518 00:55:42,630 --> 00:55:52,590 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? 519 00:55:52,590 --> 00:56:07,910 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 520 00:56:07,910 --> 00:56:18,530 should take now is usable in some parts of the world and less so in others in parts of the world, 521 00:56:18,530 --> 00:56:29,720 which experienced empire and which may still believe that empire is inevitable. 522 00:56:29,720 --> 00:56:39,350 They experienced one and then they've lived under arguably the American empire in this whole post-war period. 523 00:56:39,350 --> 00:56:44,480 For them, the notion for some elements in those countries, 524 00:56:44,480 --> 00:56:50,930 the notion that another empire could be naturally on the rise and that they 525 00:56:50,930 --> 00:56:58,310 will need to find their place in that in that empire will make a lot of sense. 526 00:56:58,310 --> 00:57:14,570 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. 527 00:57:14,570 --> 00:57:28,860 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. 528 00:57:28,860 --> 00:57:31,250 I don't want to know, but, yeah, no thank you, 529 00:57:31,250 --> 00:57:36,990 that's that's certainly very helpful for the non China specialist, such as as it were representing here. 530 00:57:36,990 --> 00:57:42,230 David, again. Have you any thoughts on that? No, I there are a couple of QAD, though, from the from the audience. 531 00:57:42,230 --> 00:57:46,890 Yes. Well, the one we've looked at already, which is the nationalist comment and question. 532 00:57:46,890 --> 00:57:49,100 The second is, again, a similar question really. 533 00:57:49,100 --> 00:57:56,490 What's the reaction from Taiwan on the official level and in general public to this motion from mainland China, 534 00:57:56,490 --> 00:58:00,950 mainland China that you've analysed in your book or. Well, brief answer to that. 535 00:58:00,950 --> 00:58:05,360 Essentially, it almost depends how old you are. As part of the answer to that question. 536 00:58:05,360 --> 00:58:12,890 I would say that the idea that there is a shared history of resistance against the Japanese between Chinese nationalists coming down 537 00:58:12,890 --> 00:58:21,020 and Chinese communists is much more shared by the generation now very old that actually fled the mainland in 1949 of civil war, 538 00:58:21,020 --> 00:58:24,130 or perhaps, you know, their their children and the older generation. 539 00:58:24,130 --> 00:58:31,280 And those tend to be people who voted for the women down on Taiwan in its more democratic form in recent years. 540 00:58:31,280 --> 00:58:39,050 But recently, popularity in Taiwan has moved much more towards a much more autonomous idea of what Taiwan is, 541 00:58:39,050 --> 00:58:44,780 that it's a sort of separate entity, a separate state. This is something, of course, that Beijing regards as an absolute red line, 542 00:58:44,780 --> 00:58:52,160 so that a discussion of this has become very fraught in all sorts of ways since Beijing offers more and 543 00:58:52,160 --> 00:58:58,190 more bloodcurdling warnings about what will happen if Taiwan actually were to declare a separation, 544 00:58:58,190 --> 00:59:05,780 which hasn't done at the moment. But it's obviously moving in directions where it feels as much as communality. 545 00:59:05,780 --> 00:59:11,150 So I'd say that many of the stories of that kind of shared experience of fighting the Japanese, 546 00:59:11,150 --> 00:59:17,870 which both Chinese communists and Chinese nationalists would have had in common even when they had very little else in common, 547 00:59:17,870 --> 00:59:25,820 would still bring together those above a certain age and who feel a strong sense of cultural links to the mainland. 548 00:59:25,820 --> 00:59:30,110 But more and more, I would say that, you know, people who are in their 20s, people in their 30s, 549 00:59:30,110 --> 00:59:35,240 you know, teenagers, school children and so forth, do not share that shared sense of identity. 550 00:59:35,240 --> 00:59:41,450 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 551 00:59:41,450 --> 00:59:47,450 their proposition about why they should be closer links between the mainland and the island are attractive, 552 00:59:47,450 --> 00:59:50,930 rather than basically saying, you know, if you don't agree with us, we're going to invade, 553 00:59:50,930 --> 00:59:59,560 which is certainly not a very emotionally persuasive way of putting the question to put it at its most mild. 554 00:59:59,560 --> 01:00:03,770 Thank you so much. Where we're running out of time, of course. 555 01:00:03,770 --> 01:00:09,910 As you know, we could talk for a good long time about this, but I wanted to before we left. 556 01:00:09,910 --> 01:00:11,440 Thank all three of you. 557 01:00:11,440 --> 01:00:20,020 So, Vivian, to David Precent and running mate, thank you so much for this really, really instructive and interesting discussion. 558 01:00:20,020 --> 01:00:23,200 I'm sorry, Vivian, that we didn't quite get to see you, 559 01:00:23,200 --> 01:00:31,300 but it was very good radio and I'm hoping that those present might join us again in two weeks time. 560 01:00:31,300 --> 01:00:40,390 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, 561 01:00:40,390 --> 01:00:49,060 which is a new recent collection of poems by Dawes Green bein translated by Karen Leader about the bombing of Dresden. 562 01:00:49,060 --> 01:00:51,430 And the author and the translator will be present. 563 01:00:51,430 --> 01:00:58,480 They'll be joined by Professor Patrick Major from Redding University and also by the writer and artist Edmund Devall. 564 01:00:58,480 --> 01:01:05,500 So do come along again in two weeks time. I think that the details from the chat. 565 01:01:05,500 --> 01:01:10,090 Thank you again very much indeed for all of you for being here today and most of 566 01:01:10,090 --> 01:01:14,860 all to our speakers for animating such an interesting and informative discussion. 567 01:01:14,860 --> 01:01:22,534 Many thanks. Thank you all very much. Great people of it.