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China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism Audiobook
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Chinese leaders once tried to suppress memories of their nation’s brutal experience during World War II. Now they celebrate the “victory”—a key foundation of China’s rising nationalism.
For most of its history, the People’s Republic of China limited public discussion of the war against Japan. It was an experience of victimization—and one that saw Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek fighting for the same goals. But now, as China grows more powerful, the meaning of the war is changing. Rana Mitter argues that China’s reassessment of the World War II years is central to its newfound confidence abroad and to mounting nationalism at home.
China’s Good War begins with the academics who shepherded the once-taboo subject into wider discourse. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, they researched the Guomindang war effort, collaboration with the Japanese, and China’s role in forming the post-1945 global order. But interest in the war would not stay confined to scholarly journals. Today public sites of memory—including museums, movies and television shows, street art, popular writing, and social media—define the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China. Wartime China emerges as victor rather than victim.
The shifting story has nurtured a number of new views. One rehabilitates Chiang Kai-shek’s war efforts, minimizing the bloody conflicts between him and Mao and aiming to heal the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. Another narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order that emerged from the war—an order, China argues, under threat today largely from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its collective memory of the war has created a new foundation for a people destined to shape the world.
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“A brilliant and profoundly researched work. Mitter demonstrates that alone among major combatant nations, China’s official historical narrative of World War II has undergone radical swings not just on the basic facts, but also on how memory serves (or not) to validate China’s governments. He provides timely and nuanced insights into how war memory today is deployed by both the Chinese government and the Chinese people.”
— Richard B. Frank, author of Tower of Skulls
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“His brilliant account shows how nation has replaced class in the moral narrative China has constructed to frame its national project.”
— Jay Winter, author of War Beyond Words -
“Written with the flair we have come to expect from esteemed China historian Rana Mitter, China’s Good War provides indispensable and timely context for the upsurge in Chinese nationalism now remaking Sino–foreign relations.”
— Karl Gerth, author of Unending Capitalism
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About Rana Mitter
Rana Mitter is a professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Oxford and the author of several books, including A Bitter Revolution. He is a regular contributor to television and radio in Britain and around the world. His writing has appeared in the Financial Times, the Guardian, and elsewhere.
About Dennis Kleinman
Dennis Kleinman has been narrating audiobooks since 2013 and has at least forty titles to his credit. His career began with a biography of a British general, Sir David Fraser, and then transitioned into a series of period romance audiobooks. He has also narrated half a dozen nautical themed audiobooks, as well as South African themed works that include The Lion Seeker and The Zebra Affaire. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.