From China’s Good War (Rana Mitter, 2020) pp70
Serious historiography on the war in China began in the reform era, in the 1980s, particularly around 1985, the date of the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war. This first decade of the reform era was associated with major changes in the production and analysis of knowledge. The Cultural Revolution had allowed few serious scholarly endeavors to take place, but this changed after 1978; Deng Xiaoping’s promotion of the Four Modernizations, building on modernizing developments in Mao’s last years, was predicated on the assurance that scientific experts would be given freedom to do research without having to bow to ideologically driven viewpoints.
The definition of “science” was a broad one (closer to the German concept of Wissenschaft) that included social sciences such as history. The more objective revisionism on China’s wartime period became associated with scholars from several institutions; one of the most important was Nanjing University, whose historians have become closely associated with innovative scholarship on the Republican period (1912-1949) as a whole. Another important institution was the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and one particular, perhaps surprising protagonist: the theoretician and propaganda chief Hu Qiaomu, who became its first president in 1977.
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