The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (review)

This volume aims to strip away the layers of Chinese historical discourse concerning the Chinese resistance to the Japanese invaders in China's northeast (Manchuria) during the early 1930s. In so doing, Mitter engages the literature on the French "resistance" to the Nazis and its equally many layers of mythology. This is a book of interest not only to China historians but to political scientists and other social scientists with a historical bent.

The correlate of the narrative of resistance is the narrative of nationalism. The story of Chinese nationalism triumphant in the face of Japanese aggression, and the eventual emergence of a Chinese Communist state, have attained mythic proportions not only in China and Taiwan but also in the study of China, in the West and Japan. Mitter shows that it took a great deal of work by a relatively small number of journalists and activists to make the Chinese public aware and concerned about the Japanese encroachment on Manchuria. In fact, it took considerable work to make the Chinese public even think of that area northeast of the Great Wall as part of China itself.

It also required the creation of heroes. Ma Zhanshan became the most prominent, although, as Mitter shows, he had at best an untidy past and present with which to work. An illiterate, he had others pen nationalistic-sounding telegrams, and the journalists turned him into a highly literate resistance fighter. Somehow the strategy worked extraordinarily well.

Mitter focuses on the idea of "resistancialism"-that is, the self-serving construction of a national resistance against a foreign invader. This idea first emerged from work about the alleged French resistance, constructed after the war to boost postwar French morale. It allowed Frenchmen to tell one another glorious stories rather than the truth of massive collaboration. Mitter also demonstrates that, contrary to both expectations and postwar narratives, those who saw themselves as nationalists during the war may also have been collaborators. Nationalism and collaboration need not always be at odds.

Where does this leave our understanding of Chinese nationalism? We learn that even in China, after a century of foreign aggression, nationalism (at least with respect to the northeast and probably elsewhere as well) was still not firmly rooted in Chinese soil. Prewar scholars make essentially the same claim, that China really was not a nation but still in the declining years of an empire. Did nationalism not make sense to many Chinese because China was simply too big and diverse-in the way that a united Europeanism is a mere abstraction to many Europeans today?

Mitter does not go down this avenue. He focuses squarely on Manchuria-an area, incidentally, that is larger than virtually any Western European country. Although in that context, he makes a compelling case, the book is not as successful as it might have been. For one thing, it examines only two or three years of history. Had Mitter chosen to enlarge the chronological scope by going back a few years, he might have engaged an immense secondary literature in Japanese. Nonetheless, this is an important addition to English-language scholarship.