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Looking Back on the Seventieth Anniversary of Japan's Surrender

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2015

John Delury ,
Sheila A. Smith ,
Maria Repnikova  and
Srinath Raghavan
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Abstract

Editor's Introduction: In mid-August 2015, Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo gave a high-profile speech looking back at the Japanese surrender of 1945. Three weeks later, also to mark the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia, China's Communist Party head and president Xi Jinping presided over a lavish parade in the heart of Beijing, which featured missiles and other Chinese military hardware as well as large contingents of People's Liberation Army soldiers and small contingents of troops from various other countries. Following up on a trio of essays in the August issue of the JAS, which looked ahead to events such as these, we now publish this special “Asia Beyond the Headlines” section made up of four essays that explore the meaning, for different individual or sets of countries, of Abe's speech and Xi's spectacle. This quartet of commentaries, by three political scientists and one historian, is designed to complement the last issue's contributions by historians Carol Gluck, Rana Mitter, and Charles Armstrong, as well as the historical photograph from seventy years ago that appears on the cover of this issue.

The set begins with an essay by historian John Delury, a scholar trained in Chinese history and currently teaching in Seoul, who has written on varied aspects of East Asian international relations and notes, among other things, the curious fact that the representative from South Korea rather than from North Korea got the warmer reception from Xi during the recent Beijing spectacle. Following this comes Sheila A. Smith, a scholar based at a Washington, D.C., think tank, reflecting on the current state of the complex bilateral relationship between Tokyo and Beijing. Appearing next is a commentary by Maria Repnikova, a specialist in both Chinese and Russian affairs who was trained in political science and holds a postdoctoral fellowship in a school of communications. She writes on the increasingly close ties yet lingering tensions between Beijing and Moscow, as well as the way that official media has celebrated, while some users of social media have mocked, the symbolism of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping presiding over recent victory day parades in their respective capitals. The series concludes with a commentary by Srinath Raghavan, a London-trained scholar now based at a New Delhi policy institute. He completes our survey of commemoration of the end of World War II with a look at the way recent parades revealed the Indian government's tricky position vis-à-vis Moscow and Beijing, as well as the relatively scant attention that India's significant contributions to World War II received, at home and internationally, during the season of commemorative speeches and displays.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 74 , Issue 4 , November 2015 , pp. 797 - 820
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2015 

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References

Further Reading and References

For more on Kim Il Sung's years in China, see Dae-Sook Suh's Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), and on his return to Korea, see Charles K. Armstrong's The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). Kim Il Sung himself writes about Choe Hyon at length in his memoir With the Century (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1993); Choe's biography is sketched out in Kang Man-gil and Sŏng Tae-gyŏng's Han'guk sahoejuŭi undong inmyŏng sajŏn [Biographical dictionary of the Korean socialist movement] (Seoul: Ch'angjak kwa pip'yŏngsa, 1996). Park Chung-hee's wartime experiences are detailed in Chong-Sik Lee's Park Chung-Hee: From Poverty to Power (Palos Verdes, Calif.: KHU Press, 2012), and his links with Kishi Nobusuke are traced in Kang Sang Jung and Hyun Mooam's Dai-Nihon, Manshū teikoku no isan [Greater Japan: The legacy of Manchurian imperialism] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2010). Xi Zhongxun's trip to North Korea is mentioned in Yongho Kim's North Korean Foreign Policy: Security Dilemma and Succession (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011), and more on Xi, including his discussions with Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang, can be found in Jia Juchuan, Liu Min, and Wang Chunming, eds., Xi Zhongxun zhuan [Biography of Xi Zhongxun] (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, [2009] 2013). On the idea of making South Korea an ally, see Yan Xuetong's Lishi de guanxing: Weilai shinian de Zhongguo yu shijie [Inertia of history: China and the world in the next ten years] (Beijing: China CITIC Press, 2013).

Japan's response to a rising China is analyzed in Sheila A. Smith's Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). For an in-depth analysis of the domestic politics surrounding the PRC's relationship with Japan, see Jessica Chen Weiss's Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China's Foreign Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). For a recent scholarly review of the diplomatic history of Japan-China relations (in Japanese), see Kokubun Ryosei, Soeya Yoshihide, Takahara Akio, and Kawashima Shin, eds., Nitchu kankei shi [A history of Japan-China relations] (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 2013). Recent essays on how to improve Japan-China relations include companion essays by Ryo Sahashi (Kanagawa University), “A Japanese View on Fixing the China Relationship,” and Zha Daojiong (Peking University), “A Chinese View on Fixing the Japan Relationship,” published on September 22 and 23, 2015, respectively, by the East Asia Forum (www.eastasiaforum.org) of the Australian National University. For an assessment of Chinese military power by the Japanese government, see the annual China Security Report issued by Japan's National Institute for Defense Studies (http://www.nids.go.jp/english/publication/chinareport/); for the view from the American side, see the annual U.S. Department of Defense reports to Congress titled Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China (http://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2015_China_Military_Power_Report.pdf). In May 2015, the State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China published the first white paper written by the Ministry of National Defense titled China's Military Strategy (http://eng.mod.gov.cn/Database/WhitePapers/).

For a comprehensive and vivid account of events in Asia during World War II, see Rana Mitter's China's War with Japan, 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival (London: Penguin Books, 2013), and on the politics of Chinese historical memory, see Zheng Wang's Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). On the history of the Soviet battles in the Second World War, Richard Overy's Russia's War: A History of the Soviet War Effort, 1941–1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 1998) offers in-depth analysis. Nataliya Danilova's The Politics of War Commemoration in the UK and Russia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) presents an exciting new analysis of Russia's deployment of war history and memory as a political tool (see especially chapters 5, 6, and 7). For a multifaceted study of China-Russia relations, see Bobo Lo's Axis of Convenience: Moscow, Beijing, and the New Geopolitics (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2008). For a close empirical analysis of China-Russia border relations and labor migration, see Harley Balzer and Maria Repnikova, “Migration Between China and Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 26, no. 1 (2010): 1–37.

The best treatment of the high politics of India is Johannes H. Voigt's India in the Second World War (Liverpool: Lucas Publications, 1988). An engaging new account from below is Yasmin Khan's The Raj at War: A People's History of India's Second World War (London: Bodley Head, 2015). For a brilliant social history of the war and its aftermath in eastern India and Southeast Asia, see Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper's Forgotten Armies: Britain's Asian Empire and the War with Japan (London: Penguin Books, 2005) and Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain's Asian Empire (London: Penguin Books, 2007). The most exhaustive and authoritative account of India's war effort remains the twenty-five-volume official history published by the Combined Inter-Services Historical Section (India and Pakistan) under the general editorship of Bisheshwar Prasad. Srinath Raghavan's forthcoming India's War: The Second World War in South Asia (London: Penguin Allen Lane and Basic Books) will provide a new synthesis and interpretation of India's contributions to the war as well as the impact of the war on the Indian polity, economy, and society.