Contested memories in Chinese and Japanese foreign policy

There are no two countries that are more tied up in knots about their bilateral history than China and Japan. The two fought a vicious death struggle in the 1930s and 1940s, involving Japanese offensive operations throughout the eastern third of China and accompanied by numerous atrocities. The worst single atrocity, from the Chinese perspective, was the Rape of Nanjing during the winter of 1937–8 when as many as 300,000 people may have been killed and 20,000 raped. To each country, the events of those times mean entirely different things. In his book, Matteo Dian adds a useful perspective on these thorny issues by showing that historical perceptions not only differ by country, but evolve over time. The historical narratives created in China and Japan were designed to serve the political needs of competing political factions of the time in which they arose. Dian refreshingly insists from the beginning that he has no intention of giving ‘prescriptive judgements’ on how the two nations should deal with their historical issues (p. 3). Initially, Dian looks at the different ways in which we study and use the notion of collective memories and highlights several different approaches. 21–5)

Acknowledgement · China · Literature · Narrative · Offensive · Perspective (graphical · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies