By Julia Lau September 3 is an important anniversary in the history of modern China. In keeping with Western Europe, the United St...
By Julia Lau
September 3 is an important anniversary in the history of modern
China. In keeping with Western Europe, the United States and others, the
country commemorated the 70th anniversary of the conclusion of the Second World
War and remembered its war dead. Beijing declared September 3 to be a national
holiday, so that all Chinese citizens could take part in events. However, the
rhetoric and tenor of the Chinese commemorations was different in many respects
from the somber, understated and generally uncontroversial American and
European ceremonies.
Taking a strong tone
For a start, Beijing invited foreign militaries to participate in a
massive military parade in which more than 10,000 Chinese troops marched. These
included troops from Russia and Mongolia, as well as Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and
Kyrgyzstan. China is reportedly hoping to have at least matched the firepower
and international participation Russia achieved at its recent Victory Day
celebrations. Unsurprisingly, this aspect of the celebrations placed European
governments and Washington in a bit of a bind, with many world leaders chary of
attending this portion of the commemoration, lest they offend Japan or give the
impression that they support militarism in the region. There is even talk that
the United States pressured the South Korean president not to attend the
military parade.
One leader who was under pressure to turn down China’s invitation was
Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who definitively turned down the invitation
to attend by citing his parliamentary schedule and domestic matters. In
mid-August, Abe reiterated Japan’s official “remorse” and “condolences” for the
war dead, but did not issue a new apology of his own. Furthermore, Abe seemed
to draw a line under past apologies, saying that Japan’s “children,
grandchildren and even further generations” should not be “predestined to
apologize” for actions with which they had no connection.
In marked contrast, the second prong of Beijing’s commemorative strategy
played up some well-used themes in the Chinese national narrative and
historical memory surrounding World War Two to its domestic audience. While
China has mostly weaned itself from the theme of “national humiliation” since
the 2008 Beijing Olympics propelled its national stature, victimhood and
humiliation continue to be useful concepts for promoting nationalism among the
young, and are still used liberally in schools’ history curricula, publicly
funded museums and other projects. It remains mandatory for students of all
ages to visit war museums to learn about China’s past humiliation.
As part of this ramped-up commemorative strategy, an exhibition was
re-launched in July 2015 at the “Museum of the War of the Chinese People’s
Resistance against Japanese Aggression” in Wanping, on the outskirts of
Beijing. This highlights the horrors of the war with sensational exhibits,
including a skull from a person killed in the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, and
graphic images of Japanese soldiers raping Chinese victims. (Most current news
reporting describes the exhibition as “new”, but the present author visited the
museum in December 2014 and saw many of the same exhibits under the same title,
“Great Victory, Historical Contribution”.) Designated as a “patriotic education
base” and sited near the historic Marco Polo Bridge, this museum is free to
all, hosting large groups from Chinese schools as well as foreign delegations
arriving in Beijing for state visits. The same museum has a highly interactive
Mandarin version of its website, designed to attract Chinese youth and other
interested citizens into volunteering for the museum and learning about China’s
war history.
China is also eager to get its message out to the world and drive home a
key historical narrative about its role as a world power that has fostered
world peace and understanding since the 1930s-40s, while ostensibly seeking
closure for past hurts from a seemingly unrepentant Japan. While the domestic
audience is the primary target of the aforementioned exhibitions, significant
portions of the accompanying texts are translated into Japanese and English. The
dominant message is that China and its people made great sacrifices throughout
World War Two in order to help the Allied powers fight “fascism”. A secondary
motif highlights the extreme brutality and sadism of the Japanese military,
underscored with graphic images and chilling dioramas of scenes from the war.
More generally, there appears to be a trend of increased media and
entertainment based on World War Two themes, primarily made for Chinese
consumption but gaining worldwide attention. In recent years, several big
budget films and hundreds of television series have been produced, some to
critical acclaim. While the television projects tend to be overtly
anti-Japanese in tone, (and sometimes outrageously conceived, with ridiculous
special effects such as Chinese soldiers cleaving Japanese ones in two with
special laser effects) the film projects are typically better conceived and
increasingly more sophisticated in presentation. By using Japan and Japanese
characters (usually military officers or soldiers) as foils against Chinese
characters, these films laud Chinese nationalism and heroism, or interrogate
more complex questions about loyalty to country, featuring spies and Chinese
collaborators, or morality in war, or the inhumanity of war for all who participate
in it. They bring to life, rightly or wrongly, “memories” for a younger
generation of Chinese who have no direct knowledge of the war.
In many ways, mass media – popular films in particular – can (and do)
influence citizens’ perceptions of key historical events, and collective
memory. However, there is some room for cautious optimism on the impact of
Chinese-made films on the minds of young Chinese and their views of the war.
Some increasingly sophisticated film projects have emerged from time to time.
Lu Chuan’s The City of Life and Death (Chinese title “Nanjing! Nanjing!”)
stands out for its use of a Japanese soldier as the main protagonist and
through whose eyes the audience views most of the action. While many Chinese
viewers criticized the director for taking an overly “sympathetic” tone towards
the Japanese (the protagonist was also played by a Japanese actor), others
lauded him for breaking away from the more typical and predictable route of
presenting all Japanese characters as “bad” and all Chinese ones as “good”.
A vexed relationship forever?
It is well-known that Sino-Japanese relations remain complicated by
multiple layers of misunderstanding and decades of suspicion, largely stemming
from Japan’s military actions in China between 1931 and 1945. The issue of
whether Japan has sincerely apologized for its past brutality in China
continues to dog bilateral ties, and can be seen as largely a matter of
perception rather than fact. From Tokyo’s perspective, the apology has already
been made, and made more than once by past and present leaders. From Beijing’s
viewpoint, this apology has been insincere and not made often enough. Each time
a minister or other significant Japanese official visits the controversial
Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, all past remorse and contrition fall by the wayside.
Having said that, both governments have good reason to keep domestic
nationalism simmering, partly to distract from problems on the home-front, but
also to engage in periodic outbursts of one-upmanship and brinksmanship. It is
almost as if the two countries repeatedly tear the bandages off this deep
wound, refusing to allow it to heal completely.
China’s commemorative celebrations have thus set the tone for the
immediate future of its fraught relationship with Japan. But while Beijing
remains keen to highlight its role as a reliable ally wartime and international
player, the manner in which it is doing so risks alienating Japan. China’s
ambitious and militaristic overtures in the South China Sea in the past months,
as well as the military parade component of its September 3 festivities, have
led Abe and others to warn against Chinese revisionism in the Asia-Pacific.
Yet, while it is still too early to tell if Beijing has irreversibly started on
the path toward revisionism, how China chooses to remember its past has
certainly set Tokyo on edge today.
About The Author:
About The Author:
Julia Lau is Lecturer at McDaniel College in Political Science and
International Relations, and Lecturer at The Catholic University of America in
Politics. She has an LLM from the National University of Singapore and MA
degrees in Security Studies and Government from Georgetown University,
Washington, DC. Her doctoral research is on China’s war memory, focusing on
media and museum representation of the Nanjing Massacre and the Second World
War, and their impact on Chinese nationalism and Sino-Japanese relations.
This article has been originally published at ISN ETH Blog and licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International License.
