In Chinese video games (authorised by the state), players slaughter Japanese soldiers from the Sino-Japanese war of 1937-1945. On the sets of Chinese TV dramas, extras playing Japanese soldiers get slaughtered every day. And in geopolitics, China is disputing Japan's sovereignty over some uninhabited rocks in the East China Sea - and soon, perhaps, over Okinawa Island too.
The Chinese have rediscovered “their” second world war. Just as the conflict fades from memory in the west, it has become salient as never before in China. To understand the country today, we need to understand its long-forgotten war, argues Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history and politics at Oxford. Remarkably, his new book is the first full account of the Sino-Japanese war ever published in English.
Perhaps 15 million Chinese died in the conflict, nearly 20 times the number of American and British war dead combined. Yet for decades China's ruling Communists rarely mentioned the war. After all, it hadn't particularly been their war. The Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek was China's main commander. The Communist party acted as his “junior partner”, writes Mitter. Indeed, in Mitter's account Mao Zedong is a relatively minor character, sitting out the war in the backwater of Yan'an. Occasionally Communist soldiers fought the Japanese, but during the war they also intermittently fought the Nationalists.
