In 2017 the Ministry of Education in the PRC decreed that the term "eight-year war" in all textbooks should be replaced by "fourteen-year war", with a new starting date of 18 September 1931 provided by the invasion of Manchuria. What are the reasons for this change of historiography?

by LordJesterTheFree

I know the CPC in China has always declared that even before the commonly accepted start of the sino-japanese war there were communist partisans fighting Japan in Manchuria, but why back date the start of the war now decades later? Even if it's just propaganda its not like they couldn't have done it immediately in the aftermath of their victory in the Civil War, so is it motivated by a genuine historiographical reinterpretation? or is it political reasons related to education issues I'm unfamiliar with in modern China?

hellcatfighter

You’re correct in guessing there is both a political and historiographical impetus towards a reinterpretation regarding the timeframe of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Ministry of Education’s decision is certainly an unwelcome step in promoting an “official” narrative of history, but at the same time, some historians in China do genuinely argue for extending the Second Sino-Japanese War back to 1931 for purely historiographical reasons. I am sympathetic to such arguments, but ultimately believe the timeframe for the Second Sino-Japanese War should remain constrained to 1937-1945 for three main reasons: armed conflict in 1931-1937 was of a limited and regional nature; war aims during the 1931-1937 and 1937-1945 periods were vastly different; and perhaps most importantly, contemporaries viewed the two periods as distinctly separate.

The political impetus for a reinterpretation of the Second Sino-Japanese War has been driven by an emphasis on nationalist patriotic education since the 1990s. The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests was simultaneously the zenith and nadir of liberalism within the People’s Republic of China, as its failure led to the ousting of Zhao Zi-yang and the majority of liberal-minded Chinese Communist Party (CCP) figures from leadership positions. The CCP elite had to find a new method to rally the masses. The pursuit of Liberalism during the 1980s was a clear failure in the minds of the elite; nor was a Marxist-Leninist (or as they say, Maoist) approach attractive after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and the impressive reforms under Deng Xiao-ping. Nationalism, they decided, was the perfect ingredient to maintain cohesion between the classes of Chinese society. The new attractiveness of nationalism prompted reinterpretations of Chinese history. The War of Resistance, a remarkable period of relative Chinese unity, was considered a key part of the new patriotic education promoted by the CCP government. With respect to AskHistorians’ 20-Year Rule, I won’t dwell too much on events after 2000, but it is clear that this patriotic education has been ramped up even further after the emergence of Xi Jing-ping as the prominent leader of the CCP in 2012.

As Mitter states, the decision of the Ministry of Education to order all textbook firms to identify the Second Sino-Japanese War as a fourteen-year war “placed a political imperative on what had, up to then, been a question of historical interpretation.” In Mitter’s interviews with senior Chinese historians (whose names he omitted due to the sensitive nature of the issue), it was disclosed that political figures from the Northeast provincies had put pressure on the central CCP government to redefine the Second Sino-Japanese War, as a eight-year framework minimised the Northeastern experience of and resistance to Japanese occupation (by 1937, the Northeastern guerrilla movement had been completely exterminated by brutal Japanese counter-insurgency operations which resettled armed Japanese colonists into areas of resistance). There might also be a legal reasoning, as an official state of war would make it easier for the CCP government to declare atrocities committed during 1931-1937 to be under the legal definition of war crimes. One scholar sardonically noted that:

Political figures in China can influence war memory, rather like Shinzo Abe...What they decide becomes a fact...Politicians’ and national leaders’ influence is huge...the final decision is in the hands of Xi Jinping.

The scholar also pointed out that academics were consulted, with a very senior academician vehemently opposing the new framework at a conference held at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the premier CCP-affiliated research institute of China. However, their influence was limited and the decision to reinterpret the periodisation of the Second Sino-Japanese War was very much politically-driven. In a 2015 speech, rather ironically named “Let History Speak [讓歷史說話]", Xi Jing-ping had this to say:

We need to grasp the connections between the regional War of Resistance [局部] and the national-type [全國性] war, the frontline battlefields and the battlefields behind the lines, and the Chinese people’s War of Resistance and the world anti-fascist war. We do not just want to study the eight-year history of the total war after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, but we must also seriously research the history of the fourteen-year War of Resistance after the September Eighteenth incident, and [the concept of] “fourteen years” should link up and unite our research.^(1)

A senior Chinese historian complained that the space for academic debate over this issue had been shut down: “Previously scholars could discuss this, but now they can’t.” As Mitter concludes eloquently: “What had been an obscure issue of definition became a tool in the creation of a more unified domestic propaganda message, along with an increased capacity to criticize Japan for war crimes in Asia.”^(2)

Moving towards the historiographical side of the debate, calls to reinterpret the 1931-1945 period as a Sino-Japanese War is most certainly not a dominant view, although this interpretation has always held some allure even before the 1980s. Within Chinese academic circles (as well as popular memory), the start of the War of Resistance has always been closely associated with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 7th July, 1937. Notably, almost all articles in the premier Chinese academic journal on the Second Sino-Japanese War, The Journal of Studies of China's Resistance War Against Japan [抗日战争研究], are focused on the 1937-1945 period. But as seen from an influential historiographical review of the war written by senior Chinese scholars Huang Mei-zhen, Zhang Jishun, and Jin Guangyue in 1987, a fourteen-year war interpretation is no fringe view:

An issue closely related to the position of the War of Resistance is the question of the war’s starting point. The traditional viewpoint is to use the 7 July incident [the Marco Polo Bridge incident] as the outbreak of the War of Resistance of the whole nation. But recently, there have been six or seven essays that take a dif­ferent viewpoint and argue that the start of the war was the 18 September incident [the invasion of Manchuria]...So some argue “During the 18 September event, the Chinese people fired the first shot in the antifascist war; the War of Resistance of the whole people, begun on 7 July, was the first battlefield of the antifascist war.” Therefore, China’s War of Resistance should be considered the starting point of the Second World War, but there is still dispute over the starting point of that War. [translated by Mitter]^(3)

Proponents of the fourteen-year war argue the occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese Kwantung Army in 1931 marked the start of more assertive and aggressive Japanese behaviour on the Chinese mainland, with a willingness to use armed conflict to resolve Sino-Japanese issues. Some with the Longue durée in mind even stretch the concept of a Sino-Japanese War to the 1894 First Sino-Japanese War and see the 1894-1945 period as a whole (unlike a recent Hong Kong public exam question which arbitrarily decided 1900 was the start of Japanese aggression in China because...er...Boxers I guess?). I am sympathetic to such interpretations mainly because it isn’t entirely out of place in historiography. In 1950s Japan, left-wing historians argued strongly for the 1937-1945 period to be seen as a fifteen-year war of aggression against China, driven in part by the war guilt and soul-searching of Japanese intellectuals over their lack of resistance towards militaristic and nationalistic trends in the 1930s and 1940s. Historians such as Tsurumi Shunsuke and Ienaga Saburo declared there was a moral imperative to view Japanese aggression in China as part of a wider imperialistic conflict, as the wartime Japanese government often deliberately separated discussions of the Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War to deemphasise the significance of the China theatre.^(4) Outside of Asia, there is a growing debate amongst European scholars (and in academic twitter feeds) over the concept of a European Civil War stretching from 1914 to 1945. These interpretations do have merit, because it allows us to zoom out and take a more macro perspective of long-term trends and divergences. In terms of the Second Sino-Japanese War, a longer periodisation gives greater prominence to deep-rooted Japanese fears over regional security and the precarious situation of her colonial enterprises in China, as opposed to the immediate factors of Sino-Japanese armed conflicts which were mostly related to local disputes.