Rana Mitter is a Chinese history and politics professor at Oxford University, where he is also the director of the China Centre. He has written numerous books, including The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance and Collaboration in Modern China, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World, and China’s War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival. His most recent book, China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism, which was published this fall, traces the evolution of how China views its own role in World War II, and how that impacts Chinese nationalist narratives. In this lightly edited interview, we discussed the legacy of World War II in China, how that legacy impacts China’s territorial disputes, and the evolving nature of UK-Chinese relations.

Illustration by Kate Copeland
Q: What inspired your recent book and why is it important to study the influence of World War II on modern China?
A: I have been planning this book for more than 20 years, and it stems from seeing how much different aspects of World War II jumped out at me when I was just wandering around Beijing on the bus or subway, or taking part in other everyday activities in China. World War II is an event that pretty much every Westerner thinks that they know. And yet actually, a lot of people in the West aren’t really aware that China was in World War II and was actually on the Allied side. I have to confess that I was in that category as well. So seeing, for instance, the huge museum dedicated to China’s wartime efforts on the outskirts of Beijing — with statues, artifacts and everything you can imagine — that made me realize [World War II] was a big deal in China, particularly when I discovered that every year, millions of people are visiting these sorts of sites. And so I found myself asking the question: what happened in World War II in China? And secondly, why does it seem to matter so much now, 75 years after the end of the conflict in China itself?
What I ended up finding out, and what I tried to say in the book, is that China’s experience in World War II shapes pretty much every aspect of Chinese life, whether you’re talking about popular culture, movies, video games, or China’s international relations.
And why do you think World War II looms so large in China?
It’s important for a few reasons. The first one is a historical reason. There is a growing sense in China that its suffering and its contribution to the overall victory in World War II haven’t been sufficiently appreciated. This year is the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, and the Chinese side of things hasn’t had that much exposure in the Western world. And yet, this was a conflict that lasted longer on the Chinese side than any other theater of World War II. There were immense numbers of casualties, not as many as the Soviet Union, but still 10 to 14 million dead, and by some accounts 100 million Chinese became refugees in their own country. Westerners tend to think Pearl Harbor is the beginning of World War II in Asia, but actually the Chinese had been fighting for nearly five years before that. They held more than half a million Japanese troops essentially unaided for about four and a half years before Pearl Harbor. All of this is now fairly common knowledge in China, but it is something that I think the Chinese want better known by the outside world.
The other important factor is that China’s World War II history helps Chinese people today tell themselves a story about themselves. So one thing that the book tries to say is that, actually, it’s not all about Japan. People tend to know about resentment towards Japan stemming from World War II, but actually the collective memory of the conflict is much more about what the Chinese people think of themselves, including their international status. Xi Jinping has actually said on many occasions that the War of Resistance against Japan, as [World War II] is known in China, is important because it was the first complete victory by the Chinese people against a foreign power. The competitors for that title in terms of war are rather limited. There’s the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century, but sadly that was a complete defeat for China. And then, in more recent years, you’ve had events like the Cultural Revolution, which was essentially a kind of civil war against themselves. So none of those wars have that kind of resonance. And I think that’s one of the reasons why World War II has enabled the state to say, look, this is when China was able to stand up for itself and fight back against invasion.
But actually, one of the most interesting things is that the state’s narrative is by no means what ordinary people in China think about World War II. Some Chinese people use it for affirmation and others for resistance. So by affirmation I mean, for instance, people in Chongqing, which was China’s temporary wartime capital, have been given tacit permission to rediscover their own city, re-discover pride in their history, and also rediscover their family stories of the war. And then there are other people who basically use the story of World War II to push back against the Chinese government today; for instance, by arguing that there was a sense of austerity and collective endeavor during the war that has been lost in consumerist China of today. So whatever the lesson you want to draw, there is someone in China who is taking World War II and drawing that lesson from it. The message is by no means unified; it fits a whole lot of different agendas.

Courtesy of Rana Mitter
The title of the book is China’s Good War. Where does that term come from and what does it mean in this context?
The title China’s Good War is meant to be both a tribute and an ironic note. Back in the 1980s, one of America’s great war historians, Studs Terkel, wrote a book entitled The Good War, which consists of oral histories of American soldiers who had served in World War II. And the idea was that even though many aspects of war itself had been terrible, the overall purpose — the defeat of Hitler and Japan — was clearly a moral one.
So, the idea of this being China’s ‘good war’ goes back to that idea that although China has suffered huge amounts of turbulence and conflict in the past century and a half, almost all of the wars it has fought cannot be a source of shared cultural memory. And that’s why World War II for China, and the fighting against invasion by Japan, becomes a ‘good war’ in the sense of good to tell a narrative about why China has been able to pull itself together, push back and create a post war society, which the regime today would argue is a fruitful legacy of the war itself.
You write about museums extensively in this book. Could you describe how museums have impacted the narrative about World War II in China?
Museums have been such an interesting reflection of the changing ideas about the war. Museums are very good vehicles to create new narratives. If you go to perhaps the single most official museum, the Museum of the War of Resistance, outside Beijing, you’ll see that, yes, it’s very dominated by statues of Chinese Communist fighters and the activities of the Chinese Communist Party in the war. But there’s plenty there about the then-Nationalist government, the Kuomintang, and the way that they fought these important battles, particularly in places like Shanghai, against the Japanese. It’s not just the story of the Communist triumph.
For many years under Mao, many parts of China were not allowed to tell their own stories about World War II. My book is partly about showing how they managed to regain their stories, and re-appropriate them, and own them again. And part of the point of the book is to say that, yes, China is buttoned down and censored and constrained in so many ways, but in terms of having a wider story about the war and what it meant, there is a much wider discussion now than there ever was under Mao.
There’s weariness on the part of the state about pushing back too much against these discussions because this rehabilitation of the former enemies of the Communists has been very popular in China. One example of this, fresh out of the headlines, is this summer’s biggest box office hit in China: a movie called Babai, ‘The Eight Hundred.’ It is about nationalist soldiers making a last stand against the Japanese soldiers in Shanghai in 1937. The movie was banned a year ago. It was supposed to open the Shanghai Film Festival in July 2019, but it was pulled the night before.
All the reports suggest it was because a group of people involved in high levels of the Communist Party on cultural issues said this film is not appropriate to release on the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. But then a year later, on the 75th anniversary of the ending of World War II, it’s fine to release it. And the popular demand was there: $300 million worth of box office tickets sold, last time I checked, which is not true for most propaganda type movies. So this shows that nationalists being restored to the story of World War II has real popular capture. And that’s one reason why the Communist Party doesn’t suppress it, and instead tries to find ways to manage it, to build it into its own narrative in a more subtle way.
In these museums and movies about World War II, the Chinese say they were the victors over Japan. Were they, in fact, victors? Or was it more complicated than that?
The Allied war effort has to be understood as beginning in 1937, when China and Japan went to war. For four and a half years, until Pearl Harbor, the Chinese fought without substantial overseas assistance. It is certainly true that China could not have been an Allied victor without the strength of the U.S. and British Empire. But if China had not resisted Japan, the western powers would have had to cope with an Asia under undisputed Japanese domination. So I don’t see why China should not count itself as a wartime victor. However, the Chinese resistance was not simply Communist. Most of the set piece battles were carried out by the Nationalists, with the Communists more involved with guerrilla warfare. And most Chinese who fought and died, or civilians who suffered, had no party affiliation at all.
BIO AT A GLANCE | |
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AGE | 51 |
BIRTHPLACE | Cambridge, United Kingdom |
CURRENT POSITION | Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, University of Oxford |
PERSONAL LIFE | Married, one daughter |
One interesting connection you draw in this book is between the Bo Xilai affair and the historical legacy of World War II. Could you describe that connection?
As most readers of The Wire China will be aware, in the year 2012, we saw one of the most spectacular political falls in Chinese political history, maybe since the Gang of Four in the 1970s. Bo Xilai had been riding at the top, but he suddenly found himself kicked out of the party, under arrest, and finally in jail. He had been the party chief in Chongqing, the city that was the wartime capital of China. And it was essentially his own personal ambition that ultimately led to his downfall. But what was less noticed is that of the many programs and activities which he was supportive of during his time in charge of the city, making sure that Chongqing rediscovered and re-appropriated their own wartime heritage was part of the mix.
Now, I’m not going to claim that was the single most important thing on his mind, but the period of Bo Xilai’s reign was very important for the way in which museums in the city and a whole variety of other propaganda activities boosted and celebrated Chongqing’s wartime history during that period. That started before he arrived, and unlike other things associated with his rule, it continued after he left. That element is still very much present in Chongqing, suggesting that actually there’s a genuine popular interest beyond simply the interests of any one politician.
What impact does the memory of World War II have on key foreign policy issues, like the South China Sea disputes?
One of the most interesting and noticeable effects of China’s growing sense of wanting to own World War II is also that it wants to own the legacy. I adapted the words of the U.S. Secretary of State in the 1940s and ’50s, Dean Acheson, who titled his memoirs of that era Present at the Creation, referring to the creation of the post-1945 world that we still live in today, though it is fraying at the edges. And I would say that what China is trying to do today in terms of international relations is to say, ‘We were also present at the creation.’
You can see this in the way that top leaders in China talk about international relations. Whenever they’re speaking in public at an international venue, they will frequently say, ‘You must remember that China was the first signatory to the United Nations Charter in San Francisco in April 1945.’ Mao said that China began in 1949, but now they are flipping that over and saying that the world actually does begin in 1945. And you know what, China was there.
This narrative can be used in two ways: the cooperative and the confrontational. The cooperative side is to take back ownership of the UN and say, under President Trump, the U.S. is clearly becoming a much less cooperative actor in international society. So China likes to say: ‘Look, we’re pumping money into the World Health Organization, we are sitting on the UN Security Council being helpful, we are doing all sorts of things to play this role in international society.’
But the war narrative also enables China to push even further against boundaries. This allows them to use wartime declarations to claim territory in the South China Sea. China has said, ‘We were a wartime victor, so we have the right to do these things as part of our victory legacy.’
Do you think China will use that confrontational narrative more as we move forward?
China is using different aspects of its modern history, not just World War II, to make different points at different times. So World War II is particularly valuable when they want to make a moral claim for status in the wider world. But other wars do other things. At the moment, we are coming up to the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War, which of course in China is not the Korean War, but is called the “Resist America War.” And at a time when the relationship between China and the United States is fraught, a lot of emphasis is being played out right now in Chinese media about the Korean War — and stressing in particular the anti-American aspect of it. So that’s a different war, which serves a different sort of purpose. International relations history can be, in other words, chosen very selectively.

Courtesy of Rana Mitter
You also write about the often made comparison between the post-World War II Marshall Plan and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Do you think that is an accurate comparison?
When the BRI first started to become well known in the late 2010s, a lot of Westerners started describing it as China’s Marshall Plan. In other words, China was taking huge amounts of investment and using it to build infrastructure to stabilize societies and economies across Asia, Europe and Africa. And to most Westerners, the Marshall Plan is a very positive analogy because the main narrative now is that Europe would have collapsed had the Americans not paid for a gift to help stabilize the continent. So calling something the Marshall Plan looks pretty good from their point of view. But this sparked a real debate in China about how foreigners were interpreting that BRI. And finally, some of the most official sources you can get, including the Global Times, a famously nationalistic newspaper, made it clear that China did not consider the BRI to be the Marshall Plan, and people should not talk about it in that sense.
The reasons for this were two-fold. One was the general sense that the Marshall Plan was part of the Western Cold War division with the Soviet Union, and the Chinese didn’t want to associate themselves with that. But a second factor has to do with General George Marshall himself, who was a great public servant, Secretary of State, one of the most admired men in America and the world during his lifetime. But the one place that he failed really was China. He was sent in to sort out the civil war between the communists and nationalists in 1946, but he left seeing that there was just nothing you could do. On the way, he became a hated figure for the Chinese Communist Party. So the likelihood that they will associate their big plan with a figure who was seen as essentially being an enemy of Mao was simply not going to fly. And for that reason, there was a huge pushback, even though the Marshall Plan analogy, objectively speaking, would have been one of the very few positive analogies that China gets for its foreign policy. Because they don’t get many others.
More broadly, there is a lot of debate over whether nationalism is actually rising in China, and the nature of that nationalism. Where do you fall on that argument?
The simple answer to that is, yes, nationalism is growing in China. But it’s not one single thing. In other words, like many other illogical phenomena, you have to look at the different strands to understand what it means. And the other point I’d make is that nationalism is often used in the West referring to China and some other countries as a sort of shorthand, as if it meant the same thing as xenophobia or anti-foreign feelings. The idea that they are the equivalent is simply mistaken. When I say nationalism, and when I say it’s growing, I mean that Chinese people’s sense of themselves as part of a shared identity is stronger than it was certainly 70 years ago, when peasants living out in the far reaches of China might never have gone more than 10 miles from their village. So in that sense, we’re talking about nationalism as a shared sense of identity.
But one of the things that I detail in my book is that, if you’re the Chinese Communist Party, this rise of nationalism isn’t necessarily unalloyed good news for you. Yes, you want people to feel more nationally minded. But actually, people take very different messages from what that Chinese nation is. There are lots of parts of the nationalist mix, and many parts are not something that the party would necessarily officially want to endorse. In other words, the idea that there’s one set of people sitting in Beijing in a propaganda factory churning out stuff that everyone believes about Chinese nationalism, it doesn’t work like that.
I want to transition to talking a bit more about UK-China relations. The UK seems to be stuck between the U.S.-China tensions, and it is often only described in relation between those two bigger countries. What are the sticking points between the UK and China that are unique to their relationship?
It’s an excellent question, and you left the EU out of that particular list of things, though that’s another place that we’re stuck between. We like to think that we’re doing our best to dance in an elegant fashion around these big powers and work out our own way. I’ve actually just co-authored a report on this topic with Sophia Gaston for the British Foreign Policy Group called “After the Golden Age: Resetting UK-China Engagement.”
So the UK has decided to leave the European Union, which means that the UK is urgently looking at its place in the world. And there is a very lively debate going on about how the UK is going to move. And here are the dilemmas: How far behind the policy of the Trump administration, which is basically for an all out confrontation with China, should the UK be? Is that something that the UK either can or should be engaged in? Can we find a more pragmatic way around that, while continuing to be much closer to the U.S. than it is to China? We also, of course, have to have a relationship with our neighbors in the EU.
But it’s fair to say that the UK is also looking for areas of advantage, where it can maximize opportunities and minimize vulnerabilities. So just an example of what I’m talking about: higher education. Britain is a country that educates the world. Lots of people from every country around the world come and study here, and China is no exception. This is partly because while U.S. university doors are not closed, the atmosphere makes it very chilly. The UK is still welcoming. And I have a sense that the Chinese would like to send more students here, and I think we as a country would like to welcome them. However, we realized that we have to be much more upfront and proactive about academic freedom issues making any interference in the classroom. We haven’t yet seen significant examples of this, but we might over time.
Britain is only just waking up to what it means to have a fully integrated China policy that takes account of the fact that Britain is no longer an EU actor.
There is no sense yet that there’s going to be a complete decoupling from China. The enthusiasm is to have a relationship that is pragmatic and avoids naivety. We need to be able to actually find areas of cooperation between the two sides, while being very frank on the values issue. And that’s become very important because of Hong Kong and Xinjiang. The prime example of that is the decision to allow Hong Kong passport holders to have residence in the UK as a gesture to show that Britain is willing to actually make some practical gesture, and not just talk about these issues. That made the Chinese government very unhappy. But I think the government felt it was really important to show that language around that issue was not just language, but that there was something behind it.
Going back to Hong Kong, how do you think the new National Security Law has impacted the UK-China relationship?
It’s too early to tell. But there is a great deal of very active monitoring on what’s going on in Hong Kong. Britain, but also other countries around the world, are looking very carefully to see where else the law might have effect. So for instance, will the judiciary still be independent? What will the fate of the foreign judges — there is one foreign judge on the court of final appeal — be? Any sign that the independence of the judiciary has been eaten away would be taken badly by Britain and the international community. So there are a whole variety of stories that are currently in motion. We don’t know yet what the endpoint is going to be, but they are not being ignored or forgotten.
MISCELLANEA | |
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BOOK REC | Chinese Thought by Roel Sterckx |
FAVORITE MUSIC | Early 20th century classical – Janacek, Bartok, Britten, Mahler |
FAVORITE FILM | Pather Panchali |
PERSONAL HERO(ES) | Parents — but outside family, Angela Merkel |
Are there any obvious things that UK policy makers are getting wrong with their China policy?
At the moment, Britain is only just waking up to what it means to have a fully integrated China policy that takes account of the fact that Britain is no longer an EU actor, and therefore has to essentially think all across the pieces on economics, security, values, geopolitics. So I’d say rather than anything being wrong, I think the problem is that Britain’s policy is too reactive. In other words, something happens in Greater China, and then Britain does something in response. It would be much better to be in a position where actually people are constantly thinking and monitoring what’s happening and engaging directly with China.
You can’t have a relationship without actually talking to the other side. This is the concern that UK observers of China have when looking at the U.S., where actually very few people in the U.S. and China are talking to each other. There is nothing to suggest that the UK is going down that route. And I would suggest very strongly that we should not. We should maintain a very strong position on our own values, while making sure the channels for dialogue remain very open at all times.
How does your vantage point as a historian impact how you view current China tensions with the rest of the world?
Being a historian does change the way that I think about it. You don’t have to be a professional historian to try to do this, but people who are reasonably informed about recent Chinese history try to understand where the Chinese side is coming from. And I always have to hastily add this point: this is not the equivalent of saying that you have to excuse everything that China does, including on human rights and closed markets. But it is possible to see that a country with a very strong collective memory of invasion, war and occupation will have a different idea about itself than a country which is generally on the winning side in conflicts.
What is your next book?
I’m now moving on to the decade after 1945, looking at that period not just as one of horrible civil war, but also understanding how China came into the world at that point. That’s the point China joined the United Nations. That’s the point when Chinese ideas about development and anti-imperialism and liberation helped shape not just their own country, but also had an influence on other peoples around Asia and elsewhere. So there’s a whole story about China being in that world. And that’s what I’m trying to put together at the moment. So in a few years, when that book is done, it would be great to come back and tell you about that.

Katrina Northrop is a journalist based in New York. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Providence Journal, and SupChina. @NorthropKatrina