ABSTRACT
Up to the 1970s, Japan's role in the 1937–1945 Sino-Japanese War received relatively little attention in Chinese history textbooks. This itself was a reflection of the dominant, or as Coble (2007) points out, the only narrative during the Mao period that, rather than drawing attention to the Chinese people's suffering at the hands of the Japanese, focused instead on the steadfast communist struggle against the dominant internal ‘other’ — the Guomindang/ Kuomintang (KMT) — throughout the war, and the Communist Party's central role in leading the people to victory over Japan. In the descriptions of the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance (AJWR) in (middle school) history textbooks of the 1970s and early 1980s, relatively little space, proportionally speaking, was devoted to Japanese actions per se. Indeed, the Japanese invasion merely formed the backdrop against which the communists and nationalists engaged in a battle for supremacy. While the textbooks did provide some graphic details of Japanese army atrocities, for example in Nanjing, or during the saodang (‘mopping-up’) campaigns, these were limited to short paragraphs in otherwise lengthy chapters devoted to the AJWR. 1 Greater emphasis was placed on the details of battles in which the communists were victorious, and the movements and strategies of the various armies. The main characters of the AJWR narrative were the Communist Party and the people, pitted against a set of domestic ‘others’: the KMT, the traitors who ‘assisted in Japan's aggressive acts’ (Kawashima 2012: 418) and the puppet regimes that cooperated with Japan, all of whose actions received greater attention than those of the Japanese invading army.
