Search

This chapter traces changing Chinese ideas of the “global” as expressed through successive ideas of the place of China in world order: Jiang Tingfu’s vision for postwar China in the Bretton Woods era, Mao Zedong’s idea of the Three Worlds, Deng Xiaoping’s notion of a more restrained Chinese influence, and the new embrace of the global by Xi Jinping in the twenty-first century. Today two major discourses seek to portray China as a foundational member of the global order: the idea of a “civilizational state” drawing on China’s longer historical trajectory, and the concept of China as a “postwar” state whose contribution to World War II sustains its claim to ownership of the post-1945 order. Beyond its variations, the Chinese discourse has constantly displayed a search for a narrative that defines China’s role in the global order not just as a matter of power, but of moral standing in an anarchic world.

Searching for common themes, this afterword questions the meaning and experience of nostalgia in Asia today. The collected essays show the important roles that conflict, trauma, and the need to create a new modernity shape, and are shaped by notions of nostalgia through much of Asia. Perhaps more so than in Europe, nostalgia in Asia seems very national. The case studies in this collection are excellent examples of how nostalgic longings are deployed to enhance national power, as well as a demonstration of the enduring influence of the nation-state over individual imagination across the region.

The Indian Ocean provides an arena for two urgent questions in the geopolitics of the twenty-first century: how global will the Indian Ocean be, and how global will China be? This chapter proposes that the Indian Ocean will be the site of a whole range of new global connections as well as potential confrontations. China is taking clear steps to create a commercially driven network in the region, a probable corollary of which is an increasingly militarized presence. This is highly likely to lead to reactions and hedging by India and the US. However, Beijing will also find itself vulnerable as it becomes increasingly global. It will not be possible for China to develop an autarkic economic system in the Indian Ocean, even if it wished to do so. A significant part of China's attempts to advance its position in the world have been less concerned with direct confrontation with existing hegemons, and more with finding ways to create new realities in places where order is still less clearly defined. Its operations in the Global Indian Ocean certainly fit into that definition, attempting to create new opportunities from the "thin hegemony" that it finds there.

The late Ottoman Empire and Qing China were both imperial states that were weakened by their relationship with the changing Western world. In 1839, the Ottoman Empire embarked on the Tanzimat reforms which sought to change ideas about education, technology, and government structure. In the same year, China experienced the first Opium War, and its defeat led to the signing of “unequal treaties” which would force China to deal on unfavorable terms with the West for the best part of a century. In the end, the empires met different fates. Qing China was replaced by a republic in 1912, but its territory remained mostly intact. The Ottoman Empire was split up after World War I. One reason for the split of the Ottoman Empire was the variegated nature of its population, compared even to the multiethnic Qing. Another was Turkey’s relative closeness to the other European powers, which made it easier for them to divide it up.

Disconcerting as it is for those of us who can remember the Cold War clearly, the period has incontrovertibly become history. We who teach undergraduates have had to come to terms with the fact tha...

The term ‘presentism’ has a variety of applications, but in this piece I shall adapt the analysis made by S. A. Smith in his article within this forum, making reference to Hartog’s idea of a ‘regime of historicity’, of a ‘sense that only the present exists’, to propose a specific argument with regard to one topic: the historical analysis of China’s experience during the Second World War. In the high Cold War era, the topic of China’s wartime experience was taken by many American historians to be part of a continuum that informed a wider debate on the US presence in Asia. In the post-Cold War era, the same topic has been taken up by Chinese historians as a means of creating a new continuum between a wartime past and a politically turbulent present by elision of the revolutionary past. If, in Hartog’s terms, the present is all that exists, the present ‘regime of historicity’ in China creates that present in part by a deliberate removal of some parts of the past which suggest difference rather than similarity with the present.

Post-World War II reconstruction in Europe and Asia is a topic of growing interest, but relatively little attention has been paid to the relief and rehabilitation effort in China in the immediate post-1945 period. This article reassesses the postwar program implemented by the Chinese Nationalist (Guomindang) government and the UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), not just in terms of humanitarian relief, but also as part of a process that led to new thinking about the nature of the postwar state in Asia. It focuses on the ideas and actions of Jiang Tingfu (T. F. Tsiang), head of the Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration that worked with UNRRA. Chinese ideas for reconstruction in China were simultaneously statist, international, and transnational, and were shaped by high modern ideas drawn from Soviet and American examples. They were also influenced by China's poverty and wartime vulnerability, which made locally directed solutions more relevant in areas such as public hygiene. Success was unlikely because of the incipient Chinese Civil War and the huge demands of reconstruction on a state that was near-destitute, with a destroyed infrastructure. Nonetheless, its characteristics still bear examination as a first, tentative chapter in a longer story of post-imperialist and Cold War state-building that would shape countries in Asia and beyond.

The end of the Second World War in Asia came so quickly that there was no time for the Allies to work out the shape of the new regional order. Indeed, the subsequent fall of the Nationalist Chinese regime and the isolation in Asia of the People's Republic of China meant that no such integrated order was established, with the US instead playing the dominant organising role. In this article, Rana Mitter explores how, in the years since the end of the Cold War, a rising China has started to use the previously downplayed legacy of wartime victory in 1945 to make claims about territory in present-day East Asia.

Editor's Introduction: This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II, an event that had profound implications for many Asian countries. This “Asia Beyond the Headlines” feature focuses on the impact that the Japanese surrender, which came several months after the German one, had across East Asia. I put a series of questions to three scholars—modern Japan historian Carol Gluck, China specialist Rana Mitter, and Koreanist Charles Armstrong—who have thought deeply about 1945 and its aftermath. Contacting them initially before the seventieth anniversary of VE Day had come and gone in early May, and then following up after that first big commemorative date had passed but well before the mid-August and early September dates associated with Japan's surrender, I invited them to reflect on the following issues: (1) how discussions associated with this year's anniversary have been and are likely to carry forward or break from those of one, two, three, or four decades ago; (2) what we should expect from the statements and other activities to come in mid-August and in early September; and (3) the varying ways that 1945 can be understood, depending on the part of the region in question, as bringing one era to a close, beginning another, or doing both of these things. Their responses, which engage to greater or lesser degrees with the three themes flagged in my initial questions, can be read as standalone short essays. They also fit together neatly to offer a collective window onto the varied meanings of the war and the wide-ranging debates that continue to swirl around how it should be understood, remembered, and commemorated.

Although the 1989 protests in China did not lead to a regime-changing revolution as did the protests in Eastern Europe, the influence of a changing global order had a profound impact on the country throughout the 1980s and beyond. In particular, the politics of transition fuelled a new fascination with the past in China, marking a deep ambivalence about the effects of globalization and foreign influence on China in the era since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. The historical myths which sustained China during the Cold War have undergone a radical shift for reasons rooted largely in the present day.1 This is not unprecedented. In the late nineteenth century, too, the ambiguity of reform provoked by the impact of western-driven globalization marked a serious problem for the Chinese imperial state. Mostly resentful of the West, partly admiring it, China remained unsure of its status in the world until the communist victory in 1949. Even today, the keenly-remembered 'national shame' of humiliation by foreigners is a rhetorical constant everywhere from top leaders' speeches to the ranting monologues of taxi drivers.2 Now once again, during another era of globalization, China is ruled by half-willing, halfresentful reformers who are unsure how much of the outside world to let in. The era of reform in contemporary China, broadly considered to have started in 1978 with the ascendancy of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, has seen a multitude of new interpretations of Chinese history. These stretch from the ancient (the revival of Confucianism after the condemnation of Confucius as 'feudal' for much of the twentieth century) to the very recent past (the presentation of Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution not as socialist triumphs but as chaotic disasters).3 However, in this article, I shall

China … is determined that it will have greater influence than it enjoys at present, and it will use historical justifications to make its case.

This paper argues that the first phase of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 saw a significant change in the relationship between state and society in China, leading to a greater use of techniques of classification of the citizenry for purposes of welfare provision and mobilization through propaganda, methods until recently more associated with the Communists than with their Nationalist rivals. The paper draws on materials from Sichuan, the key province for wartime resistance, showing that the use of identity cards and welfare provision regulations were part of a process of integrating refugees from occupied China into the wider wartime society, and that propaganda campaigns were deployed to persuade the local indigenous population to support wartime state initiatives. Although Nationalist efforts to mobilize the population in wartime were flawed and partial, they marked a significant change in the conception of Chinese citizenship.

The cult of personality surrounding Mao Zedong peaked during the initial phase of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR, 1966–1969). China’s youth was mobilised behind the Chairman’s call to ‘bombard the headquarters’, and eagerly took part in Mao’s revolt against his own party. The role of the young Red Guards caught not only China but the world’s attention. It seemed that they followed Mao not as a political leader, but rather as a god, ‘the reddest of red suns in all our hearts’. This chapter will examine the case for interpreting this phenomenon in terms of ‘political religion’. It will suggest that there is a strong case for arguing that the irrational and totalistic nature of the mass movement during the GPCR can be interpreted fruitfully as a secular theology. It urges caution, however, in using the term wholesale when considering the elite discourse which initiated the Cultural Revolution, and which did not seek actively to create a secular priesthood and religious community. It also suggests that the religious models most appropriate for comparison are not those of pre-modern China, but rather the European derived religious models which shaped Western political religions, and were well-known and understood by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1947 has not been sufficiently understood as a narrative in its own right, but rather, as a transitional conflict between Nationalist and Communist rule. The examination of the visual imagery of warfare disseminated through newsprint and books is one way to reinterpret the history of this period. Through a close reading of images printed in a Shanghai newspaper, Zhonghua ribao, during the final days of the battle for the city in 1937, we see how the news was shaped to impose a narrative of order with a positive teleology at a time when China was plunged into chaos with no guarantee of the eventual outcome of the war. The nature of this narrative is explored through examination of images of the body, as well as the positioning of images in the context of the printed page. The conclusion then contrasts these images with a pictorial history of the Sino-Japanese War published during the Civil War, in 1947. It suggests that although this book is able to bring narrative closure to the earlier conflict, its own narrative is imbued with an unease caused by the reality of the new war that had broken out within months of the ending of the war against Japan, and suggests that narrative closure is never truly obtained.

The Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 was perhaps the single most destructive event in twentieth-century Chinese history. However, there has been relatively little attention paid to how war was experienced in the Nationalist-controlled area (‘Free China’) under Chiang Kaishek. Two autobiographical texts are examined here, one a sequence of reportage from the early war years by the journalist Du Zhongyuan, and one abiji(notebook) written immediately after the war's end by the social scientist Xu Wancheng. By choosing particular modern or anti-modern genres and styles to write in, the authors expressed a wider sentiment about the war's ambiguous role in modernising China. Du's work hopes to create modernity from destruction; Xu's suggests that modern warfare has created chaos.

One hundred years after the 1911 Revolution (Xinhai Revolution) in China, its meaning continues to be highly contested. Paradoxically, the more time that passes, the less certain either political actors or scholars seem to be about the significance of 1911 for the path of Chinese revolutionary history. This essay examines three phenomena: the appropriation of 1911 in contemporary political and popular culture; the use of 1911 as a metaphor for contemporary politics by PRC historians; and the changing meaning of 1911 over the past ten decades, particularly during the years of the war against Japan. The essay concludes that it is precisely the “unanchored” nature of 1911, separated from any one path of historical interpretation, that has kept its meaning simultaneously uncertain and potent.