The first of the two epiphanies in question took place less than six years ago – on the anniversary of the end of World War II (i.e. September 3, 2015), when a grand parade was held in Beijing
To put it bluntly, before that event, not only Americans, but the world at large had somehow lost the memory that among the great victorious powers in that war was also China.
And that it lost 20 to 35 million people in that war (mostly from hunger and other scourges). And that the war would have gone much worse for the USSR and the US if China hadn’t fought the Japanese onslaught and occupation to the last shred of territory in its south-west – it eventually held out, drawing in millions of Japanese armies, which could have been very harmful to us and the Americans.
But these facts of history, to repeat, started coming back to the public six years ago, in annual waves before the actual August-September dates. More interestingly, for one clever American political scientist, Rana Mitter, it was the starting point for a book on what kind of country China is today, based on his changed perception of that very war victory. The book (The Good War: How World War II Created a New Nationalism) is already the event of the year and is being actively discussed. And it will be discussed until that highly imagined moment when America and the West recognise the obvious as to what China is today.
The fact is that the great Asian victorious power turned out to be a “forgotten ally” not only because of the malignancy of the West, but also because of the difficult attitude of the first generation of leaders of the People’s Republic of China towards that victory. Recall that for that country WWII was fought on three fronts, with both Communists, led by Mao Zedong, and Nationalists, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, fighting the Japanese. At the same time they continued to wage war against each other. But the generalissimo was still a member of the coalition of victorious powers and he and his government were involved in the mid-forties in creating the world order that the West is now actively breaking.
And in 1945 Mao, having received from the USSR the weapons of the Kwantung Army which we defeated in August of the same year, continued the civil war until its complete victory in 1949. So the coyness of early Chinese propaganda in talking about who bore the brunt of the war with Japan and in discussing the world order is understandable. So is the coyness of Soviet propaganda, which spelled out complex eights before and after the quarrel with Mao.
But, again, in the jubilee year of 2015, Beijing unequivocally declared that it was accepting the generalissimo’s military and geopolitical legacy. And all the years that followed, Rana Mitter has been sorting out how this happened and what the U-turn from semi-dumbness to the very clear Chinese position today means.
The author’s conclusions are these. First: for Beijing, the legacy of the war suggests that the country was involved in shaping the current world order in the 1940s (in particular, creating the United Nations) and is returning to the same role today. And second, Beijing’s new perception of WWII came about through a total internal ideological overhaul and regime transformation. This second part is the most important thing for the world today. Because it helps to understand the scale of the changes that have taken place in one of the two current superpowers. Where once they saw themselves as the continuation of one side of the civil war, Beijing now sees itself as the heir to an entire Chinese civilisation, with Chiang Kai-shek and beyond.
Mitter carefully traces how Beijing historians and ideologues began to rethink attitudes to the Second World War literally as the reforms began in the 1980s. It was a kind of tiptoe procession – although it was still going on in economics, party ideology and everything else.
It is obvious to the eye that China before 1976 (Mao Zedong’s death) and afterwards was a very different China. Under Mao it was a country driven by the “contradictions between classes” and a world revolution and its provocation – in short, the familiar leftism. Today we see a clearly capitalist country, albeit with a decorative preservation of the traditional leftist ideology, but national and state ideas clearly prevail.
There are parallels with the history of the USSR. There is a term “Stalinist upheaval”, which occupied the 1930s. The starting point of that process somewhat resembled Maoist China: a course towards world revolution instead of building socialism (or whatever) only in one’s own country; a cultural madness in the broad sense, where the entire previous historical and other heritage was discarded and replaced by an entirely new and “proletarian” culture. The list of books confiscated from libraries at that time was impressive – occupying dozens of pages, even Shakespeare, not to mention the “noble” authors of Russia, was included there. And – a very different country in the late 30s, which regained Pushkin (on the centenary of the poet’s death), and then the legacy of our wars heroes and other achievements of the entire Russian history.
But, as in China since the 1980s, it has gone through amazing twists and turns of ideology, which tried to pretend that in fact nothing unusual was going on, no change of conceptions, but only a refinement of them and getting rid of “kinks”.
With regard to the USSR it is very difficult to talk about the transit from a left-wing socialist state to a national power, if only because in terms of the economy the change was rather the opposite, from the limited capitalism of the 1920s to total bureaucratic socialism. In China a similar process in ideology took place in parallel with the return to the market. True, the world of the 1930s bears little resemblance to that of the 1980s and 1990s, partly because the Chinese reformers had the sad experience of the collapse of the Soviet economy before their eyes.
But for many Americans and others, Mitter’s book is an epiphany, because under Donald Trump, Republican and other conservative ideologues have taken the amazing and suicidal action of trying to portray China as a totalitarian communist power in which nothing has changed – well, or that power has lately supposedly gone back to Mao. And some even believed it. Though in general the idiocy of this exercise was obvious not only to Chinese scholars, just as the doom of the idea of denying that two nationalisms, Chinese and American, were clashing, was obvious.
But somehow it happens in our world that the attitudes of nations and states to World War II and its legacy put everything in its place.
Dmitry Kosyrev, RIA