"Past Experience, If Not Forgotten, Is a Guide to the Future"; or, What Is in a Text? The Politics of History in Chinese-Japanese Relations

Abstract

The quotation in the title above is taken from a statement made by Zhou Enlai in September 1972 on the occasion of the Zhou-Tanaka Communique, which normalized relations between China and Japan. I use it here not only because it has been a staple over the past decade of Chinese criticism of Japanese endeavors to rewrite the history of World War II in Asia but also because it points to an aspect of the relationship between Japan and China (and Asian countries in general) that seems to me to be peculiar to that relationship: the issue of history. Since 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Education approved a major revision to textbooks, the issue of history has remained in the forefront of Chinese thinking over China's relationship to Japan. The history of World War II is the most visible