“12. Owning the War” in “The Geography of Injustice”
CHAPTER 12 Owning the War Constructing the Contours of National History, 1970s–1980s
In the autumn of 1971, the political situation in East Asia began to change, though no one could have guessed its ultimate direction. On October 25, the PRC became the new official representative of China to the United Nations, and Chiang Kai-shek’s representatives were declared to have “unlawfully” occupied the seat.1 This was the international scene, but the US government did not switch its embassies until full diplomatic credentials had been negotiated and exchanged, something that did not occur until the start of 1979. Slowly over the decade, the PRC appropriated the mantle of international recognition from Taiwan and regional power dynamics began to shift. After being off the international radar screen, because of neglect but also the long interregnum of self-imposed exile and revolutionary fervor gone awry, PRC leadership emerged from the shadows. Toward the end of October 1971, Premier Zhou Enlai gave Japan’s Asahi Newspaper a late-night interview, one of China’s first after the announcement that the PRC would replace the ROC on the UN Permanent Security Council. The Japanese news item took the headlines of the first three pages of the newspaper.2 But all was not quiet. The Lin Biao Incident had occurred just before China’s international reemergence and threatened to undo everything. In September 1971, supposedly fearing for their lives, Marshal Lin Biao and family flew to the USSR, but their plane crashed over Mongolia. All the passengers died. Mao had previously deemed Lin as his grand successor, so many questions remain unanswered, even today. The impact of Lin’s supposed failed coup allowed Mao and Zhou Enlai to purge the politburo of those who were labeled as or actually were Lin’s allies. Liu Shaoqi had already been axed in the heat of the Cultural Revolution. The 1960s into the 1970s was an era that demonstrated the sort of postwar imbalance that had developed between China and Japan, even just looking at the most cursory figures. Japanese travel to China in 1969 saw 2,643 Japanese visit, but only seven Chinese journeyed to Japan. By 1971, the figures were 5,718 and 74, respectively.
Zhou Enlai was keen to show the world that the PRC was now in command of its future and that it would proceed cautiously. However, in the UN, China regarded talk of Taiwanese independence as out of bounds. In addition, perhaps in an attempt to snuff out rumors that the Chinese were unaware of what was happening in the rest of the world and therefore not ready for the international role newly thrust upon them, Zhou showed the Asahi journalists “internal eyes only” reports and foreign news sources to which only high-ranking CCP officials had access.3 But that did not mean the handover was seamless. US national security advisor Henry Kissinger, during his November 1971 secret meeting with Ambassador Huang Hua, PRC permanent representative to the UN, believed that China was caught off guard by its sudden entry into the international vortex of the United Nations. Kissinger assessed the Chinese as rudderless concerning what to do, not enthusiastic and “feeling its way in an unfamiliar environment.”4 Not everyone took that stance. Some assessed the Chinese UN team as “first rate,” suggesting that Huang was a long-standing diplomat with excellent language skills, as were his underlings.5
Several months after the epoch-making interview with one of Japan’s leading newspapers, US president Richard Nixon practiced with chopsticks so that he would not embarrass his hosts at the enormous banquet held for him in Beijing in February 1972.6 Notwithstanding that restoring official relations with the PRC was the goal for both the United States and Japan, actual negotiations hit a few obstacles, and it was not until the late 1970s that official treaties were signed. Change came, but it evolved slowly due to so many political and economic impediments. The 1960s into the 1970s was a volcanic period for China owing to the seismic political aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, which might be best symbolized by one item, the “Little Red Book” of Mao’s quotations. Initially, it was an “ideological field manual for soldiers” to help them gain access to Mao’s thought, which would be a “spiritual atom bomb of infinite power.”7 At one point, it was the most printed book in the world, and the overproduction was rumored to have been kept in massive air-conditioned storehouses once Maoism waned.8
During this same era, Japan had been advancing its own economy and trying to assure the world, after the somewhat more security-focused foreign policy of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, that the country was more interested in trade and economics. “By 1969 50 percent of Japan’s Overseas Development Aid (ODA) went to Southeast Asia. Japan thus began to follow a path that would later see it become the largest provider of ODA to the Third World.”9 Much of this aid shifted to China after 1972. As China emerged back into the world arena through the 1970s, the World Bank and Japan were largely responsible for the economic foundations on which China developed. “Japan provided more than three quarters of China’s total bilateral loans totaling $10 billion (1.6 trillion yen) in the years 1979–1995. The massive capital infusion into China was a product of China’s changed development priorities and economic performance.”10
On July 27, 1972, Japan’s Kōmeitō Party head, Takeiri Yoshikatsu, held a long meeting with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. They exchanged diplomatic platitudes, but the Chinese wanted Japanese commitments to trade, aid, and access to the outside world. Zhou was semiconciliatory but firm: “The ties of trade and friendship are deep. It has been 27 years since the war, but relations between Japan and China span 2,000 years back to the Qin Dynasty. The previous 27 years is only but a moment.”11 While seemingly flexible in their attitudes toward the history of World War II, the legal issue of Taiwan remained a looming problem for Sino-Japanese negotiations. Zhou stated that China understood from its own experience during the Qing era, when indemnities were placed on it for the Boxer Rebellion, that reparations could be burdensome and obviously saw China’s move not to request them as a great propaganda coup.12 Zhou explained, “Chairman Mao has said that he will renounce the right to seek reparations. If we seek reparations, this would place a burden on the Japanese people. This is something that the Chinese people fully understand.”13 The next meeting played up how the Japan-China relationship was an improvement over that of the United States and China. Zhou told his Japanese interlocutors: “We have returned 30,000 Japanese, including war criminals. We have carried on friendly attitudes. Friendship, memoranda, and trade are paths that the former minister Matsumura [Kenzō] opened up. Japan knows this. The US does not have this. They have even less of cultural exchanges. Ping-Pong diplomacy lapsed last year, but it has been reestablished. Ping-Pong is the reason that Nixon conducted secret diplomacy to reestablish relations. That ball is very important.”14
As Japan embarked on a new era with the PRC, Tokyo was forced to close formal relations with Taiwan. This proved difficult. The question for the Japanese was: how could they create a legal word salad that allowed them to deny what had been a lawful treaty with the KMT and replace it with one that gave preference to Mao’s communist leadership on the mainland? This move was all the more painful because many KMT leaders had long-standing ties to Japanese politicians and bureaucrats, having studied together before the war and sharing vague but potent positions covering Pan-Asianism and Japan’s future role in East Asia. China long held that Taiwan was a “renegade province,” and dealing with it without going through Beijing muddled in China’s internal affairs, a protocol to which the PRC strictly adhered for its own practice and as a foreign policy. Some Japanese, like Shiina Etsusaburō, a long-standing bureaucrat and close confidante to former prime minister Kishi Nobusuke, hoped that Japan could maintain independent relations with both Chinas. Ultimately that proved impossible, at least according to the letter of the law.
The Japanese wasted no time in opening up new portals for relations with the Chinese. Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei, who replaced Satō Eisaku after he managed to get Okinawa returned to Japanese sovereignty, jumped at the chance to go to China and sign a joint communiqué with Premier Zhou Enlai. This would be the “first sustained diplomatic relations between a sovereign Japan and the Chinese mainland since 1938.”15 This détente was epochal for several reasons. Japan and China had had no diplomatic relations for decades yet finalized arrangements on September 27, 1972, after only four days. Japan’s diplomatic treaty with the USSR, a communist entity like China, took more than a year and a half. With South Korea the talks elongated to fourteen years until a treaty was concluded in 1965. The key was that for the Japanese it was politically necessary, and savvy, to not immediately pursue a peace treaty with China, a formal diplomatic move that was not signed until 1978. The 1972 document was symbolically a “joint communiqué” and thus did not need to be ratified by the Japanese Diet. In this manner, key Japanese politicians and diplomats used a unique strategy to begin relations on the right foot in a calculated way to avoid domestic roadblocks that had previously tripped them up.16
The CCP under the leadership of Premier Zhou Enlai also realized the necessity of preparing the groundwork for mainland Chinese public opinion to accept these new moves toward what appeared to be sudden rapprochement with the long-despised Japanese. According to Wu Jinan, who headed public opinion investigation campaigns in China, many Chinese did not understand why China had to suddenly reestablish relations with Japan. Many interviewed were against Japanese prime minister Tanaka’s proposed visit to China, and emotional opposition ran high among the middle-aged and elderly. Wu and his colleagues assessed the situation and told their higher-ups that a public lack of support, if not active opposition, risked derailing the situation and creating an uncomfortable rift. CCP leaders and heads of the propaganda bureau came up with a solution, which was to publicize and paint the establishment of relations with Japan as a key policy decision that would aid the PRC’s strength in countering Soviet revisionism and US imperialism in the region. Even more cleverly, the plan detailed, this move would quell future Japanese militarism because entering into formal relations with the PRC would pressure Japan to accept China’s five principles of peaceful coexistence. In short, all the reasons to oppose the visit from Tanaka were logically dismembered through advance propaganda campaigns.17
Other events also held the potential to upset the delicate changes woven into place. Deaths of key CCP leaders in the mid-1970s confused the PRC’s political situation, as did Mao’s poor preparation for a successor. Premier Zhou Enlai, who had served loyally for so many years and been China’s mouthpiece for foreign policy for decades, died on January 8, 1976.18 Marshall Zhu De, the Communist Party’s most venerated military general, died in July 1976. From early 1974 on, Mao was increasingly incapacitated. He had a cataract operation and could not read. Parkinson’s disease rendered him virtually speechless. Mao finally succumbed to his panoply of maladies in September 1976. The CCP had no real plans for a transition after Mao’s death, and the chaos of the previous decade during the Cultural Revolution had stunted national trust in every regard.
However, even with Chinese détente and renewed engagement with Japan and the world, by the late 1970s China was once again on the back foot. It had squandered its economy, the people were grossly unhappy in the domestic rule of law, and the leadership was in shambles. Hua Guofeng had been chosen as Mao’s eventual successor, but he engendered little enthusiasm. US official Thomas Gates, head of the US liaison office in Beijing, met Hua in 1976 and called him colorless and found him full of caution.19 Within a month of Mao’s death, a “bloodless, but successful coup d’état” took place within the central corridors of Chinese power. In October 1976, the new first vice chairman of the CCP, Hua Guofeng, ordered the arrest of the Gang of Four.20 Their trial would not take place until several years later, but the moment was pregnant with significance. At the same time, party stalwart Hu Yaobang made an initial move for some form of administrative reversal of the mountain of “miscarriages of justice” (yuanjia cuoan in Chinese) that had plagued China during the previous decades.21 Millions of Chinese had been falsely accused and/or found guilty of arbitrary or specious charges of being a counterrevolutionary or undermining the state. Justice would be brought to China, but this required investigating history, because unraveling how these injustices had occurred would involve analyzing the political situation that had allowed these legal contraventions to happen. And behind the political situation lay the taboo of indicting Mao, Maoism, and potentially unlocking further and massive social discontent that had built up over the years. It is important to consider just how much the Cultural Revolution had cut China off from the rest of the world. Premier Hua Guofeng, who succeeded Mao as party leader, first journeyed abroad to Yugoslavia and Romania in 1978 as China’s top leader. With the exception of participation at the UN by PRC representatives, the last trip abroad by a top Chinese leader had been almost twenty years prior, when Mao returned to Moscow in 1957.22
In 1979, when Deng Xiaoping took the political reins of China behind the scenes (he never took a formal title and Hua Guofeng remained chairman of the CCP from October 1976 to June 1981), the country was in political disarray and economic freefall. Grain production had fallen lower than it had been in 1957, and the per capita income stood at a dismal rate. Factories were still working with equipment received from the USSR in the 1950s.23 Deng was not sprightly for a leader to start anew; he was already in his mid-seventies. He had survived three nonfatal purges: first during the rise of the CCP, in 1966 at the dawn of the Cultural Revolution, and in 1976 just after Zhou’s death and five months before Mao’s. If Deng and his Chinese counterparts had learned two things, they were (1) how deeply Chinese culture had depreciated under Mao’s reign and (2) how desperate the PRC was to send students abroad to learn. Modernization could not happen without new talent and new technology.
Not long after Mao lay in state off Tiananmen Square, a few blocks away “Democracy Wall” began to take shape. From 1977 to 1978, all sorts of large poster campaigns cried out for justice against corrupt cadres and listed popular complaints about all the injustice that had occurred in Chinese society during the previous two decades under Mao’s reign. These massive posters and diatribes were hung on city walls in a specific quarter. At the same time, thousands of others from the hinterlands flocked to Beijing to press the government to remedy the wrongs that had been done to them, hoping that their grievances would be heard.24 But as with so many previous movements, this form of social venting soon turned into mass embarrassment for the party.
Wei Jingsheng, a former Red Guard and electrician, was one of the most prolific protesters. His writings were published in a samizdat journal at the time. After initially tolerating Wei’s criticisms of the state, the authorities arrested and jailed him in 1979 for promoting democracy.25 Wei was damning of his incarceration; he was held in the same prison from which Japanese communist Itō Ritsu was released at almost the same time. Wei wrote, “Torture at Qincheng has been even worse than that which used to be carried out by the Nationalists in the 1940s.”26 Mu Xin, former editor at the Guangming Daily, experienced Qincheng Prison. Years later he commented that the prison practiced cruel and unusual punishment.27
While imprisoning Chinese citizens who posted criticism of the PRC government, CCP leaders were by this time considering the release of Japanese communist Itō Ritsu. Enough of a thaw had occurred in China for the incarcerated former Japanese communist leader Itō to be rediscovered in his Chinese prison cell. After twenty-seven years in a series of Chinese prisons, with no charges placed against him, Itō was suddenly summoned one day in October 1979 and told by prison officials: “The Japanese Communist Party requested you to be sequestered and questioned, and you have been left for a long time in this jail. Moreover, considering your health, we believe it inadvisable for this to continue any longer. From the standpoint of ‘revolutionary humanitarianism’ the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China has decided to grant you release.” Itō was told he could either stay in China or return to Japan.28 Regardless of his ultimate decision, he was counseled to “please not reveal any of your political opinions while in China.”29
It was only at this moment that Itō saw PRC national currency for the first time. His physical condition had deteriorated to the point that the PRC authorities hospitalized him several times to ensure that he could successfully repatriate to Japan. It was clear that the CCP did not want his death on their hands. Itō quickly started up correspondence with his long-suffering wife, who had not known his whereabouts or even whether he was alive. She quickly wrote back, and things moved along in preparation for his return to Japan.30 When Japanese embassy staff in Beijing asked him some questions in preparation for his return, it was obvious they were not fully apprised of the situation. Defiant until the end and keen not to implicate the JCP or his Chinese hosts, Itō tersely replied, “I will not say a word.” When asked “What were you doing in China and where were you meeting with high level communist cadres?” Itō answered, “I was studying but fell ill. For a long time I was convalescing. And more than that I will not talk about.”31
It appears that initially Itō still regarded the Japanese government as the enemy even though it was his own party that had set him up. His return was discussed in the Japanese Diet, and some members of parliament, not clear about the background of the story, went so far as to claim that Itō was seeking asylum in China. This was, of course, a gross misrepresentation. In September 1980, Itō repatriated to Japan and was taken from his plane in a wheelchair. His speech was slow and slurred, but he appeared happy. His reappearance as if from a long lost time machine was a national shock, especially considering that he was assumed to be dead. The extent of his suffering was soon noted in Japan’s parliament and was surely a commentary on the behavior of the JCP that put him into such circumstances as well as Chinese incarceration standards. Parliamentarian Tsukamoto Saburō pointed out: “According to reports, he cannot see very well and he has hearing loss. He speaks haltingly and at the Japanese Embassy he was only able to communicate by writing because he suffers so greatly from impairments.… From this sort of speculation imagining that he was illegally detained and that he submitted to an investigation in the form of a lynching was probably the judgement arrived at by most Japanese who harbored common sense.”32
China’s release of key Japanese prisoners was symbolic of the overall shift in managing a more open and transparent legal system. In February 1979, the People’s Daily published an article on how to establish a healthy legal system in China. Marshall Ye Jianying told those assembled at the press conference that “our socialist legal system from the founding of the country has not had the most favorable healthy establishment. Lin Biao and the Gang of Four dug this hole for us and under the guise of ‘strengthening the dictatorship of the proletariat’ they merely grabbed who they wanted and opened up on the people and officials a fascist dictatorship. We now understand these lessons that a country must have law and a system.”33 Ye went on for much longer, detailing why a robust legal system was necessary and then linking it to Chinese socialism. Ye, along with Hu Yaobang, launched the first salvo that demonstrated the reign of the arbitrary would now be slowly dismantled.34
The flagship newspaper the People’s Daily is the mouthpiece of the CCP. Its editorials are used as commentaries in weekly study sessions. All editorials and content arise from the party, and the paper transmits the message. Rarely is there independent analysis critical of the power structure as one finds in democratic media. Before commentary is produced, the article goes through a selection of ideas process, drafting of the wording, and finally revision or censorship. These strict procedures mean that what is published in the main media organs is essentially a government consensus policy to be broadcast from the top down.35 So, an editorial appearance of Ye’s comments indicated that the party approved of this direction.
Almost coincident with Wei’s trial and Itō’s repatriation, from November 1980 to January 1981, China held its most important tribunal to restore political stability and the CCP’s reputation—the Gang of Four trial. The newly reintroduced “rule of law” through the courts put into play a Communist Party historical bid to completely disengage Mao from responsibility for the debacle of the Cultural Revolution and to place it at the feet of the Gang of Four. Deng himself put a lid on criticism of Mao because he believed that this form of soul-searching would not heal the nation.36 The year 1980 was significant for China because it fundamentally restored a renewed attention toward the pursuit of justice. However, this resurrected interest also created two new problems. The first was the rectification of those who had been illegally or incorrectly charged during the previous two and a half decades of the Cultural Revolution, its aftermath, and the years preceding it since the 1957 anti-Rightist movement. The second was the rise of historical investigations into the war with Japan, memories and introspection that had essentially been dormant since the closure of the 1956 trials of the Japanese war criminals years before. The last few years of the 1970s had witnessed epochal changes in both how China was seen internationally and how it was being understood.37
Not only did the history of injustice greatly hamper China’s evolution toward modernity, but the party had also carved up society into a new feudal sort of class structure in which the sins of the father were visited upon the whole family for subsequent generations. This family origin labeling system greatly retarded economic development. These class categories stuck around for a bit but were greatly reduced or removed after the Cultural Revolution.38 Regardless of the massive number of cases over decades of malfeasance, by 1982 all the cases of injustice were supposedly examined and the whole process was surprisingly deemed complete. The total number of people whose cases were reexamined reached 2.3 million.39 According to official statistics from August 1980, 23,921 people had been executed during the Cultural Revolution.40
Gang of Four Trial
As declarations about history were being crafted for public consumption, history was also being judged in China, once again in a courtroom. Post–Cultural Revolution China opened its most famous trial on television to demonstrate legal reform and a supposed return to a just society. From November 1980 to early 1981, four years after Mao’s death, elements of the former state leadership were charged with crimes in a public setting, complete with the trappings of a courtroom. The Gang of Four, singled out as responsible for the nation’s calamities, were Zhang Chunqiao, a vice prime minister of the State Council; Wang Hongwen, a vice chairman of the CCP; Yao Wenyuan, a secretary of the CCP in Shanghai; and Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. Besides the gang, others were implicated in the trial, including five military officers and Lin Biao, accused of having plotted to overthrow Mao. But the main focus was the gang, a radical clique that fell from grace after Mao’s passing. The case was tried in a special court under China’s Supreme People’s Court, reinstated after a two-decade hiatus. Forty-nine witnesses were called to testify, and 651 pieces of evidence were submitted.41 In January 1981, the court found all guilty, and sentences ranged from sixteen years in jail to death. An editorial in the People’s Daily announced, “This is the people’s verdict, history’s verdict, a just verdict.”42 The death sentences were commuted, but Jiang Qing died by suicide years later.
The case was important legally for the supposed transition of the return to the normal socialist legal system, but also as a moment of post-Maoism. It was, in part, a legal spectacle in ways similar to the war crimes trials the Chinese had held of the Japanese about twenty-five years prior. Fei Xiaotong, a famous Chinese sociologist, was rehabilitated from obscurity to serve as a judge at the Gang of Four Trial. His career had been cut short by China’s political waves of counterrevolutionary fervor. Fei wrote that twenty-three years of his life were wasted during that era, when he was pushed out of society and forced to clean toilets.43 In his estimation, “the immense significance of this trial is that it announces China is on the road toward opening an important new door to establishing a healthy socialist rule of law.”44
In the internationally published English record of the trial Fei was even more strident toward the defendants in the introduction, which was entitled “Reflections of a Judge.” It is important to remember that Fei had no legal education; he was a sociologist who had been trained decades earlier in the United Kingdom. He proclaimed to the world that with this trial China had turned a corner with new legal procedures. He took pains to point out that the leaders on trial in this court had violated criminal law, unlike others who had merely made political errors. This was precisely the point that Deng and others were trying to make to save Mao and Maoism. Fei was careful to use the analogy of a ship advancing at high speed but headed by a navigator—in this case, Mao—who had made an error in navigating. In his extended analogy, the Gang of Four, in charge of the ship, formed cliques and started plotting. The navigator might have steered the ship incorrectly and needed to answer for this action. However, the other culprits tried to exploit that situation “for their own despicable ends,” Fei proposed.45 Fei was pleased with the trial and ranked it highly. “It must be remarked, however, that these perpetrators of crimes in the end were given a just trial and justly adjudged by history. Some writers abroad have likened the trial to those held in Nuremberg and Tokyo after the Second World War. This is rather appropriate in my view.”46 Most Western scholars probably did not view the trial on the same broad scale of justice that Fei did but perhaps more akin to the judicial process to bring calm to what had been a large-scale lawless society and to combine to the extent possible these stories of injustice into a single narrative of the past that would serve future PRC political stability.47
At its base, “the Gang of Four trial was an expression of justice inseparable from its transitional context, the transition from the Cultural Revolution to the post-Mao era. It was a political show trial to be sure, but the historian must take this fact as an impetus for further inquiry and not as the final judgment.”48 The dilemma for the struggling PRC was how to modernize and gain power and wealth while toeing the line on communist political theory and retaining supposed Chinese values. One could say this is still an issue for the current administration under president Xi Jinping. The Gang of Four trial created an official verdict on the past for public consumption.49 In fact, one could argue, as I have, that war crimes trials are in a sense official verdicts of the past. The Gang of Four trial revealed the long absence of law and education in China. Perhaps because there were so few lawyers of talent from which to choose, or because she had a high profile, Jiang Qing initially had hoped to have former minister of justice from the 1950s, Shi Liang, serve as her defense counsel. Shi declined, but she did accept “Deng Xiaoping’s personal request to review a draft of the Special Procuratorate’s indictment in July 1980. She also continued to serve on the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and as vice-chair of the multiparty Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress.”50
One would think the Gang of Four trial would in no way be linked to the pursuit of justice against Japanese war criminals, but that was not the case. The global conversation about jurisprudence and the law had not been limited to the West.51 But what had occurred in China meant that expertise in the law was in short supply. The nation would have to rely on the experiences of the small cadre of legal experts who had been politically quarantined since the days when war crimes were pursued against the Japanese. One example of these deeper and unexplored linkages can be seen in the career of Qiu Shaoheng (Henry Qiu), whom we already briefly encountered with the 1946 Shibuya Incident and subsequent trial of Taiwanese in occupied Japan. Qiu’s professional advancement is a fascinating example of the importance of examining the “legal flows” of juridical ideas around Europe and East Asia.
Qiu had graduated from Soochow University, China’s first university that taught Western law in English. In the immediate postwar period this rare set of skills, along with his proficiency in the English language, made Qiu valuable as an internationally trained lawyer in a country that suddenly required his unique talents so that it could join the international community and prosecute Japanese war crimes. Not only did Qiu serve at the Tokyo Trial, but he also took part as one of the few Chinese members of the Allied effort to deal with internal Japanese imperial hierarchies coming into conflict with the tragedy of postwar reality where former Japanese imperial subjects, the Koreans and Taiwanese, wallowed in legal purgatory. Finally, because of his participation in two Allied trials in the 1940s, Qiu was once again needed on the legal stage when China reinstated the rule of law after the disastrous decade of the Cultural Revolution.
In early 1980, Special Court Chief Justice Jiang Hua called on Qiu to be a key “consultant” to the Gang of Four trial. There were many judges on the case, but the sole consultant was Qiu. Until 1979, Qiu had been teaching English at the Shanghai Foreign Language Institute but then returned to Beijing.52 He designed the Chinese courtroom for this momentous trial, which aimed to bring order back to the chaos as a “symbolic space for China’s transition to legal modernity.” Qiu based much of the setting, including curtains and color scheme, on his experience from the Tokyo Trial because he believed that this trial venue had created the definitive atmosphere of legality for the proper pursuit of justice.53 This special tribunal in Beijing was not just for domestic consumption but served as a bid for China to represent its restored legal credentials to the international community. Nothing was left to chance, including figuring out how to deal with Jiang Qing’s refusal to accept the court’s jurisdiction and Zhang Chunqiao’s refusal to speak in court. Qiu supposedly spent days scouring legal records for a precedent and succeeded in finding a 1977 case from Charlotte, North Carolina, where the defendant was so abusive of the court that it disturbed the trial proceedings. The court ordered the defendant out and proceeded with the prosecution. Qiu translated this US precedent, and even though it had no legal standing in a Chinese court, the authorities were happy to see that they had some legal footing if and when problems arose and defendants in the dock disrupted the court.54 Equally important were Qiu’s English-language skills, which were employed by the party to propagate a positive message of the trial proceedings to the world through the state’s English-language press and other media.55 Qiu gave an interview to the Xinhua News Agency on January 29, 1981, concerning the Gang of Four trial. He was very careful to state that the trial was fair. He added, “A defendant in a Chinese criminal court is presumed neither innocent nor guilty.” The goal of China’s criminal procedures, he remarked, was more to assess accurate findings about what happened and then apply the law.56 So much for justice.
Years later, after serving as a consultant in the Gang of Four trial, Qiu was instrumental as a mainland lawyer in the drafting of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.57
The CCP’s Resolution on Mao and History
The Gang of Four trial attempted to bring some measure of closure to a chaotic era, but it also uprooted confusion about responsibility. The way forward appeared to be the creation of a second historical declaration. This pronouncement was designed as the means to redirect Chinese society—to urge it back on the track of a productive form of state socialism and to rectify the wrongs suffered by many. PRC leaders build consensus and thus ideological legitimacy of their rule. Because there are no firm guidelines for the handover of power from one leader to the next, formulating a document that is then issued as a directive serves as a mandate for the continuation of authority. “The only way leaders have to establish legitimacy, even such hegemonic leaders as Deng and Mao, remains the transfer of their own personal preferences into collective decisions, regardless of the methods they may use.” In this way, “the process of formulating a document becomes a process of politically legitimizing personal preferences of leaders.”58 Since the information system is closed, and the mass media can sometimes but not always gain access to these documents, “obtaining documents thus helps officials to control the masses.”59
Once again Deng Xiaoping was at the forefront, thinking about how to salvage a ruling party that had clearly demonstrated its inability to properly govern over the previous several decades. Deng copied what the communists had done in 1945—create a commission that would deliver a historical verdict to the people concerning what had happened. From 1980 to 1981, Deng and his team worked on their draft statement. Deng Liqun was instrumental, but it appears that even though he was leader on paper, Deng Xiaoping maintained the final gavel strike on what was written. The always-present Hu Qiaomu, longtime Mao theoretician and confidante, played a grand role as well. Political theorist Hu was a magician of party word craft and had formed part of the committee that put forward the first resolution on historical questions back in 1945. Thirty-five years later, the main sticking point was how to fly the banner of Maoist thought while at the same time criticize Mao. Moreover, how to avoid creating mistrust toward the party? The proclamation contained parts that reaffirmed the correctness of Mao’s historical position and thought but also allowed the country to bypass political upheaval by noting that this ideology also had failures. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao made mistakes, they admitted. But when “looking at Mao and this era we need to seek out the truth from facts and analyze it. When looking at the last thirty years of our nation’s history since the new China, we must do the same and assess what was successful and what was a mistake. The aim of all of this is to realign our unity and to come together.”60 But, as Deng also said, China should not conduct all this analysis in too much detail, which essentially meant that citizens should grin and bear it.
This Chinese historical resolution document parallels the war responsibility (sensō sekinin) investigations the Japanese completed. Certainly, the two commissions were different in that the Chinese murdered their own and Japan was imperialist in its aggression. Japanese also murdered their own if one thinks of forced group suicides in Okinawa toward the end of the war or the idea of a “dog’s death” that Fujiwara Akira enunciated. But Sino-Japanese efforts are similar in the nature of trying to come to terms with governments that were fundamentally flawed and led their respective countries in disastrous directions. But Deng was clever and said that Chinese could not just criticize Mao and be done with it. China needed, in Deng’s assessment, a systematic framework that could assist society to change and advance.
The Resolution on certain questions in the history of our party since the founding of the People’s Republic of China passed at the sixth plenary session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, in June 1981. Serving as the new way forward, this historical declaration affirmed over numerous pages that the party was responsible for creating new China and its achievements were great. But somehow or other the party and the country had gotten derailed from the true policy of following Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. At one point the team that drafted the paper wrote, “History proves the line the party has put forward in this era of transition is completely correct.” Such emphasis would make it hard to criticize the party or its decisions because it had now attached itself to national success and salvation. Additionally, Mao had erred, but the conclusion was that his success was greater than his errors in leading China on the new path. Additional articles in the lengthy document declared that “only socialism can save China,” and “without the Chinese Communist Party there is no new China.” Toward the end the resolution stated that the party “dares to squarely face and correct its mistakes and is resolved to and has the power to prevent a repeat of these sorts of grievous errors that were committed in the past. After all, our party’s mistakes and frustrations were only transitory phenomenon.” An important emphasis was that “the party will also proceed with righting the injustices suffered by the population.”61
The goal was not to find truth or develop a new direction for the country. The aim was to save the system from itself. The motivation for a second historical declaration hinged on how to realign a political system that had gone badly wrong and save it from another revolution that would surely have upended things and pushed the country toward further friction. Everyone involved was essentially willing to avoid admitting that the emperor (Mao) had no clothes. How could one dispute the revolution as having been incorrect after already investing about a half century in its evolution? As a way around these conundrums, and in a move that helped deify Mao away from the man himself, the committee decided to divvy up the Maoist era. The first seven years after establishment of the new country were now seen as “good.” That was an easy decision. The ten years of the Cultural Revolution were “bad” and should be negated. That left two other eras that were tough to delineate. The problem was that there was some sort of cataclysm almost every year: the anti-Rightist movement of 1957, the Great Leap Forward in 1958–62, and the famine of 1959–62, to name just a few. Many had lived through at least some of these transitory phases, had seen people become sick and die from famine, or knew others who had been unjustly accused and/or punished. But when leaders met and discussed this era, they all fell silent.62
There Can Be Only One History!
Mainland Chinese ideas about a unified interpretation of history continue to ossify and corral Chinese society. Starting in the 1980s, and then with renewed vigor in the 1990s, the CCP has upgraded patriotic education as a cornerstone of teaching Chinese youths to love their country in a certain way with a specific view of the past. This is undergirded by a litany of newer dictates to further solidify national opinion. An official CCP history website has a collection of President Xi’s declarations on history and the party’s anxiety concerning what it deems “historical nihilism” (lishi xuwuzhuyi).63 Historical nihilism is a loaded term that means not only that the PRC and Chinese history in general are now clarified by the government but also that only legalized versions are permitted in public discourse owing to party decisions that improper history would harm the state. This is partly what is believed to have happened in the former USSR, which eventually denied the legacies of Lenin and Stalin leading to its downfall.64 This conviction that negative historical opinions brought down the USSR pervades the higher circles of the PRC leadership. To investigate the issues, the party, in coordination with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, produced an eight-episode special television documentary, Preparing for Danger in Times of Safety: The Historical Lesson of the Perishing Soviet Communist Party, in 2006.65 In July 2013, the Xinhua News Agency reported that three agencies of the PRC government—the General Office of the Communist Party of China, the General Office of the State Council, and the General Office of the Central Military Commission—had collectively produced a document: “Ideas on work to further strengthen martyrs’ memorials.” A move was afoot for the nation to entwine in solidarity concerning the historical sanctity of those who sacrificed themselves. The goal was that “their spirit would become the source of energy to galvanize all the peoples of the country to implement the People’s Republic great flourishing and unremitting struggle.”66
The PRC has enacted several new laws over the past few years under President Xi Jinping that further aim to congeal a unified public opinion toward not only generic history but specific historical examples as well. A special website devoted to coverage of China’s seventieth anniversary of its founding posted an explanatory article: “Why does China need to establish a law to protect its heroes?” Chinese president Xi frequently quotes a famous aphorism in response: “To get rid of a people’s country you first need to eradicate their history.” Through history the CCP seeks to affirm that its rule and political choices are the sole future path for the nation’s well-being. This idea then gets tied up with hero worship. Consequently, because Japan played a significant role in harming China during World War II, when many of these heroes emerged, a tenuous link between modern history and anti-Japanese emotion has been formed.
This public and official sentiment about “proper history” further escalated in a law adopted at the 2nd Session of the Standing Committee of the Thirteenth National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China, which came into force on May 1, 2018. Officially known as the “Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Protection of Heroes and Martyrs,” it is comprehensive at thirty articles long. In the law, citizens’ historical views are now intimately linked with the promotion of state socialism, the power of the state, patriotism, and “strengthening the spirit of the flourishing China Dream.” Article 3 is indicative of this feature: “The achievements and spirit of heroes and martyrs are the central embodiment of the Chinese People’s collective historical memory and core values of socialism.”67 Article 5 created a new public holiday on September 30 to mark Martyrs’ Day, where a commemorative ceremony was designated to be held at the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a tower in the center of Tiananmen Square in Beijing.68
Xi Jinping has led the CCP to set down a legal opinion that China controls law outside of its borders as well.69 These new ideas concerning how law should be used as a tool of the state for control of historical opinions, as opposed to serving as a lever to bolster the rights of citizens, emerged in part from the introduction of Nazi legal thinker Carl Schmitt’s writings into China in the late 1990s.70 Mainly pushed by legal scholars at the prestigious Peking University, adherents of this path believed that law needs to protect the state from outside enemies, which would of course put it into conflict with international norms. The evolution of this thought process suggests the growth of a belief that the introduction of new legal norms destabilizes Chinese society. Consequently, “China needs to free itself from Western legalism and promote the creation of a new model of governance.”71
Japan’s Ideas of Justice Are Still Enrobed in Discussions of the Tokyo Trial
The Japanese state does not dictate in the same way as the PRC how history should be viewed, but it has demonstrated similar tendencies toward official conservatism since the late 1980s. However, this was not always the case, and at one point change seemed imminent. For example, on June 20, 1984, in a lower house foreign affairs committee meeting, Takazawa Torao, a Socialist Party politician, asked if the foreign minister had seen recent Japanese news reports about the imperial army’s use of poison gas on the Chinese mainland during World War II. A Japanese researcher had uncovered incontrovertible proof on a secret Japanese military map that detailed the numerous locations where the Japanese imperial army had used mustard gas and other poison gases in China.72 Takazawa wanted the foreign minister’s reaction. Minister of Foreign Affairs Abe Shintarō affirmed the government’s supportive position and was adamant that the situation required further investigation.73
Within almost a decade, the tone of the domestic discussions changed. In an upper house Diet debate on November 30, 1995, delegate Tachiki Hiroshi, a member of the JCP, asked about the Japanese imperial military’s use of poison gas during the war. In response, Director General of the Defense Agency Akiyama Masahiro said the imperial military had used nonlethal weapons like “sneezing gas” and such, but if they used munitions like “mustard gas” or fatality-inducing agents, the record was not clear enough with archival evidence to declare with certainty.74 Even though personal military records, like Ōe Yoshiwaka’s, and news reports about other archival evidence were known, to say nothing of the evidence and the testimony of the Chinese peasants from the 1956 trials in communist China, some quarters of Japanese officialdom had grown more skeptical because that information was supposedly not contained in their own repositories.
From the mid-1990s onward, Japan’s discussions about the US-imposed postwar constitution centered on a set of questions pertaining to history. In 1997, former prime ministers Nakasone Yasuhiro and Miyazawa Kiichi, both elder statesmen by this point, held a series of debates in the Asahi Newspaper. The exchange was revealing in that it showed how the conversation had evolved in Japan concerning justice. In their first installment, the two started off with Nakasone saying that the postwar constitution was fifty years old and the Meiji era had lasted sixty years. The time was ripe to have an inspection and check the status of Japan’s current constitution in ten years to see if it fit historical developments. (Why constitutions were so frail they need to be “oil checked” every six decades Nakasone did not elaborate on.) The less hawkish Miyazawa responded that the postwar constitution was something that, while good, came from the United States, and this meant that it did not really emerge from the will of the Japanese people. Miyazawa opined that the peace constitution was a good document, and the cost of energy and time to the people would not be worth the effort to redraft. He added that Japan should not wish to alienate its neighboring countries and invite misunderstandings. But the central point for Nakasone in the discussion was that Japan’s peace constitution had fundamentally cost Japan its autonomy. Nakasone freely admitted that the constitution had brought peace and prosperity to Japan, but that it was the outcome of the alliance with the United States, among other contexts. Nakasone told the newspaper that surely Japan had grown rich and that high-level growth was nonmilitary, which was admirable. But, he added, “our country has an empty soul.”75 Nakasone was, of course, harking back to the idea that the Tokyo Trial and other war crimes trials left a national stain on Japanese history, which was hard to expunge. Nakasone assessed that Japan’s war against the West should be differentiated from its war in Asia. The former was a war of self-defense, the latter a war of aggression. This, in turn, also colored his perception of the Tokyo Trial as improper because it did not distinguish between these events.76 After the war, this mind-set created a masochistic sense of self in Japan on which the conservative wing wanted to locate the origin of contemporary Japanese malaise. This Tokyo Trial–centered view of history does not permit Japanese to maintain a sense of pride, goes the reasoning.
Miyazawa disagreed and retorted that after fifty years Japan had turned into a good country, so the result was something to evaluate highly. Japan had advanced to this age, Miyazawa noted, precisely without using military force. The country must strongly guard against the use of force to avoid making the same mistakes of the past. Nakasone did not dismiss this opinion, but he parried that Japanese needed to talk more about the nation and not make those discussions a taboo.77
Over the next several installments the two continued to chat about the nature of the constitution and efforts to alter it throughout the 1960s, which never resulted in any successful change. In their fifth round of conversation, published on April 26, 1997, Nakasone brought up his decision to be the first prime minister to publicly visit the Yasukuni Shrine in 1985. He made the visit because the war dead were there, he said, and to not go in an official capacity would deny their memory, which the country had pledged to uphold. But, Nakasone rejoined, he did not know that war criminals were enshrined there. He was also surprised that his visit was used in political squabbles in China, which probably in part forced out Chinese president Hu Yaobang. Miyazawa concurred and said that he saw Yasukuni as a place for symbolizing the spirits of those who gave their life for the nation. Neighboring countries can say what they like, but we are not bound by their comments, he expressed.
The Asahi Newspaper then posed a vexing question to both statesmen, asking why it was the case that many who wanted to change the constitution were also supporters of the view of history that labeled the war as one of “liberation,” as the Greater East Asian War. Nakasone ventured first and said clearly that he was against those who pushed a positive interpretation of Japan’s imperial history. But he also denounced General MacArthur’s Tokyo Trial view of history, where Japan was guilty of a conspiracy to dominate East Asia. The war with the West was a regular war, Nakasone intoned, while war in China and Southeast Asia was an “aggressive war,” and the two needed to be considered separately. Japan had apologized, but passing a resolution of apology through the parliament would be rash, Nakasone believed. Nakasone assessed that Japan’s current constitutional provisions for peace and the respect of human rights were strong, but “the concept of justice has grown very weak.”
Miyazawa offered that such arguments about the war always seem to lead to this point. He, too, believed that at times blood had to be shed for justice and freedom. And that idea resonated with him. However, Japanese must talk about this very prudently as a topic of political discourse. When a Japanese police officer was killed in Cambodia during a 1993 UN peacekeeping mission, the whole country quickly responded that all Japanese participants should immediately be pulled out. Miyazawa was in charge of UN work then and criticized this as a weak social response. Nakasone complimented Miyazawa for his efforts but added that if Japan tried to solve the problem of terrorism with money, this demonstrated that the country harbored no actual concept of justice.78
The debate might not have arrived at any conclusion, but the discussion revealed that even well into the 1990s, the issue of the Tokyo Trial and the form of justice it delivered still deeply shaped the Japanese political landscape.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.