ABSTRACT
China’s emergence as a world power is recent and also evolving quickly. China is a remarkable country. In the space of a couple of generations it has condensed the stages of world economic history in moving from an agricultural peasant economy, through an established industrial economy, to a new service-oriented knowledge economy that leads 5G mobile network technologies. Soon after 1989, the Patriotic Education Campaign was launch by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that focused on ‘the humiliating experience that China has suffered in the fight against the West and Japanese invasion’. Only a pluralist historical account that explores alternatives including traditional Confucian, Marxist, liberal and CCP perspectives will allow for the necessary historical complexity of China’s past. Boyang argues that Japan plays an important role in both victim and non-victim narratives.
