This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Rana Mitter, professor of the history and politics of modern China at St. Cross College, Oxford, and director of the University of Oxford China Centre, about his new book, China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism. The book is a meditation on how the evolving official narrative of World War II in contemporary Chinese political discourse shapes not only China’s domestic politics but its foreign policy as well.

8:51: What Chinese nationalism looked like before World War II

30:48: Shaping the narrative of China’s wartime experience

47:13: Giving China the postwar period it never had

57:55: Chinese public discussion about the war 

Recommendations:

Rana: The Sword and the Spear, by Mia Couto. 

Kaiser: How the coronavirus hacks the immune system, by James Somers, and the anti-superhero series The Boys, available on Amazon Prime.

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