Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history at Oxford University, discusses his book from earlier this year, China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism.
Now seventy-five years after China’s victory over Japan, China is rethinking how it grapples with the legacy of WWII (see, for example, The Eight Hundred, the highest-grossing film of 2020, discussed towards the end of the show). Mitter argues that this growing emphasis on World War II is evidence of a subtle rewriting of history, where 1945 takes on a significance comparable to 1949, and the CCP adopts historical victories of the Kuomintang.
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