China's role in WWII victory forgotten by West

LONDON-- China played a major role in the Allies' victory against Japan in World War II (WWII), but its wartime contributions were largely forgotten in the West due to the quick arrival of the Cold War, a leading British historian said.

"I find it really amazing that the very significant role of China in WWII really isn't very well understood in the West," Rana Mitter, director of Oxford University's China Center, said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

FORGOTTEN ALLY

Mitter, professor of history and politics of modern China at Oxford University, is the author of "Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945," a critically acclaimed historical account of China's eight-year war of resistance against Japanese aggressors in WWII.

The book, first published in 2013, was complimented by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as one that "makes an important and moving contribution to the historical record by illuminating the largely forgotten war that took the lives of millions of Chinese, yet ultimately facilitated the rise of modern China."

Having spent more than 10 years researching the origins and effects of the war, the 45-year-old historian said the statistics of China's sacrifice in WWII was "staggering," but the facts were still little remembered by its wartime allies in the West.

"More than 14 million Chinese were killed during the war, and some figures put it even higher; some 80 million to 100 million Chinese became refugees in their own country during that time; at its height, some 750,000 Japanese troops were being held down by the Chinese troops, and yet these facts are not really well known in the West at all," he noted, citing figures he acquired from war archives.

"It's very important that a greater acknowledgement is made of China's role in WWII to remind the Western powers, including the United States and the Europeans, that China did make a very major contribution to shaping the world that we know today," he told Xinhua.

"After all, if China had surrendered in 1938, the shape of Asia might have been completely different for years or decades, even for today perhaps," he said, adding that Chinese resistance was vital in holding back Japan's militarist ambitions in Asia.

He suggested that the Western world look at China's contributions to the war and "remind themselves that the shaping of the modern world -- the world today, including Asia, comes in significant part from China's decision to continue resisting Japan."

"China ended up as one of the Allied powers alongside the Soviet Union, the United States and the British Empire at the end of WWII," he said.

COLD WAR LEGACY

In the interview, Mitter attributed Western ignorance of China's role in WWII to the quick advent of the Cold War following the conflict.

"It became part of a much bigger struggle in the Cold War, so both in the West and in China, it was difficult to tell the story. For the West, China had gone from being a wartime ally to being part of the opposing bloc in the Cold War," he explained.

"During the Cold War, that made it very difficult, almost impossible for Americans and other Westerners to investigate and talk in an objective manner about what had happened in China during the war," the professor continued.

Moreover, he added, it was difficult to get the archives and the documents in China, and hard to meet Chinese historians and discuss the subjects with them at that time.

The Western amnesia has begun to change in recent years, with a number of scholars doing "really a lot of work" in trying to fit the Chinese story into the global story of WWII.

"Nowadays the situation has changed in very significant ways: historians go back and forth between each other's countries, and that means that now that the Cold War is over, we are able to achieve a much more nuanced and much more objective history of those wartime years," said the scholar, who can speak Mandarin fluently.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

The historian noted that the Cold War rivalry has led to contrasting consequences in Europe and Asia in terms of dealing with WWII legacy.

Now it is "unthinkable" for the old enemies of Europe to have a really major dispute with each other because the former foes in WWII have reached a "universal comprehensive settlement," while in Asia the same sort of multilateral deal has failed to take place.

"I think that it is fair to say that 1945, the end year of WWII, is to this day unfinished business in Asia, in a way that's not true in Europe," he said.

Mitter analyzed that the way to avoid a bad lesson of history and learn a good lesson in WWII is "to look at Asia today and understand one very important thing: the ways that power is distributed anywhere in the world, including in Asia, is not zero sum."

"It's not the case that if one power becomes stronger, another one has to become weaker. That was the problems back in the 1930s and 1940s ... and that was one of the things that let the Japanese launch on their own imperialist adventures in the region," he warned.

"Nowadays we've come to realize that actually various powers and various countries can live consensually in a region, and in fact have to live in a region consensually with each other," he said.

He argued that the time is "ripe" for Asia to pick up the "unfinished business of 1945" and reach a "peaceful, comprehensive and consensual agreement" in the region.