China's Good War Paperback by Rana Mitter

Product Details

• Publisher: Belknap Press (2022-10-11)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 336 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780674278615
• Item Weight: 368.55 grams
• Dimensions: 0.0 x 0.0 x 0.0 cm

A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year
A Spectator Book of the Year

“Insightful…a deft, textured work of intellectual history.”
—Foreign Affairs

“A timely insight into how memories and ideas about the second world war play a hugely important role in conceptualizations about the past and the present in contemporary China.”
—Peter Frankopan, The Spectator

For most of its history, China frowned on public discussion of the war against Japan. But as the country has grown more powerful, a wide-ranging reassessment of the war years has been central to new confidence abroad and mounting nationalism at home.

Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, Chinese scholars began to examine the long-taboo Guomindang war effort, and to investigate collaboration with the Japanese and China’s role in the post-war global order. Today museums, television shows, magazines, and social media present the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China that emerges as victor rather than victim. One narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order—a virtuous system that many in China now believe to be under threat from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its own past is a new founding myth for a nation that sees itself as destined to shape the world.

“A detailed and fascinating account of how the Chinese leadership’s strategy has evolved across eras…At its most interesting when probing Beijing’s motives for undertaking such an ambitious retooling of its past.”
—Wall Street Journal

“The range of evidence that Mitter marshals is impressive. The argument he makes about war, memory, and the international order is…original.”
—The Economist

About the Author

Rana Mitter is the author of several books, including A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World and Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945, named a Book of the Year in The Economist and Financial Times. He has commented on Asia for the BBC, NPR, CNN, the New York Times, the History Channel, and the World Economic Forum at Davos. S.T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations at Harvard Kennedy School, he is also a Fellow of the British Academy and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.