Beijing Letter: China's war commemorations contrast with hesitant approach of Japan's

Irish Times

10-07-2025

Beijing's Museum of the War of Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in the southwestern district of Fengtai is far from the city's main tourist attractions.
But the museum was the centre of attention this week when it reopened after an extended closure, with almost twice its former display space and a new exhibition called For National Liberation and World Peace.
It tells the story of the 14-year struggle, which began in 1931 when Japanese troops invaded and occupied northeast China and ended with Japan's formal surrender in September 1945.
The exhibition is part of a programme of events, documentaries and short-form dramas that will culminate in a military parade on Tiananmen Square on September 3rd, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of the war.
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The exhibition uses thousands of artefacts and photographs, as well as video and virtual displays, to portray the war as a national effort that involved the entire Chinese people.
But the role of the Chinese Communist Party is at the centre, as it is seen mobilising soldiers and civilians in a united front with the Nationalists, and guiding the war of resistance.
The museum is next to Beijing's Marco Polo Bridge, where Japanese troops began their full-scale invasion of China on July 7th, 1937, with an attack on Chinese forces.
China sees this battle not only as the start of the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, but also of what it calls the World Anti-Fascist War, or the second World War.
President Xi Jinping marked this week's anniversary with a visit to Yangquan in Shanxi province, the site of one of the war's big battles called the Hundred Regiments Campaign.
The campaign was a huge sabotage operation led by the Communist Party's National Revolutionary Army against the Imperial Japanese Army and its Chinese collaborators, and it has long had a celebrated place in the party's wartime lore.
'The past should not be forgotten and should be a lesson for the future. Coming here is to receive spiritual baptism,' said Xi.
The war between China and Japan cost 14 million lives between 1937 and 1945, and during its first few years neither the Soviet Union nor the western powers offered any assistance.
China had a place at the Potsdam Conference at the end of the second World War, but Winston Churchill's dismissive view of this war as a sideshow in the Pacific theatre contributed to its neglect in later western accounts.
Dedicated sections in museums like London's Imperial War Museum have increased western awareness of the Sino-Japanese war in recent years. Meanwhile, the Chinese have been engaged in a decades-long research effort that includes deep and intensive study of Japanese military and civilian decisions during the war and the world's leading institute devoted to the Tokyo War Crimes Trials.
Memorialising the war is part of a broader narrative of national rejuvenation, and the party is explicit in its view of museums as 'patriotic education bases' as well as sites of memory.
This is especially evident at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, built around a mass grave where the skeletons of some of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians slaughtered by the Japanese lie half-buried.
When the museum first opened in 1985, its focus was almost exclusively on the tragedy and the suffering of the massacre. Recent additions to the memorial hall concentrate on the Chinese victory over Japan and its importance in the creation of a new China under communism after 1949.
China's confident programme of commemorations this year contrasts with the hesitant approach of Japan's prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba.
He will make no official statement backed by his cabinet to mark the anniversary, but has instead asked a panel of experts to study the circumstances that led Japan to go to war against much of the rest of the world.
In his statement on the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in 1995, prime minister Tomiichi Murayama expressed 'deep remorse' and issued a 'heartfelt apology' for Japan's aggression. Junichiro Koizumi maintained a similar approach on the 60th anniversary in 2005 but Shinzo Abe changed the tone 10 years later.
In his statement on the 70th anniversary, Abe used some of the same expressions of remorse as his predecessors, but he noted that more than 80 per cent of Japan's population was born after the war.
'We must not let our children, grandchildren and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologise,' he said.
Under pressure from conservative elements in his Liberal Democratic Party, Ishiba has decided to follow Abe's guidance by saying nothing.