The Legacy of China’s Wartime Reporting, 1937-1945: Can the Past Serve the Present?

Japan’s invasion of China in the summer of 1937 dealt a devastating blow to Chinese journalism. Yet despite the hardships, China’s wartime reporters produced a legacy of vivid writing. In the face of a series of major defeats, the journalists attempted to shore up morale and stressed the heroic resistance of Chinese forces. They reported on Japanese atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing, but not to such an extent that might erode morale. During the Maoist era, the legacy of this war reportage largely faded from a public memory which privileged the revolution. When a “new remembering” of the war emerged in the reform era, the heroic resistance narrative from war reportage dovetailed nicely with the new nationalism of today’s China. But this literature has been less helpful in developing the theme of Chinese victimhood, a key component of the new memory of the war. Finally, memoir literature, so common in most combatant nations, has been problematic in China. Those who remember their war experiences do so through the prism of later traumas, particularly the Cultural Revolution.