by Emily Matson
University of Michigan Press, 2026
Cloth: 978-0-472-07811-0
Paper: 978-0-472-05811-2
eISBN: 978-0-472-90589-8 (OA)
China’s Date Debate is an in-depth investigation of the Chinese Communist Party’s remapping of China’s World War II timeline from eight years (1937–1945) to fourteen years (1931–1945). Instead of the previously accepted starting date of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937, the Chinese Communist Party defined the war’s starting date as the Mukden Incident on September 18, 1931, which triggered the Japanese Kwantung Army’s invasion of Manchuria. Since the 1980s, scholars from Manchuria have demanded a fourteen-year war timeline to encompass the invasion of their homeland. By the 1990s, other scholars took notice and started to counter with claims that the eight-year timeline was the more accurate. Subsequently, a fierce “date debate” emerged between the two sides that was only resolved by the 2017 proclamation from the Ministry of Education.
Emily Matson demonstrates that the decision to set China’s World War II timeline at fourteen years was not merely a top-down decision, but was influenced by decades of Manchurian scholarship on the war. China’s Date Debate recenters Manchuria as a region of critical importance for China’s national identity today and the implications of this “date debate” on the Chinese Communist Party’s domestic legitimacy and international image.
Emily Matson is Adjunct Professor of History at Georgetown University, a Stephen M. Kellen Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a recent fellow for the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations.
“This carefully researched book shows how China’s historical narrative on the Second World War has evolved through the debates on Japan’s occupation of Manchuria (Northeast China). Attentive to detail and nuance, it challenges the notion of official historical memory as monolithic or static. Instead, it reveals how China’s wartime past has been written and rewritten not only by leaders and bureaucrats, but also by regional scholars, within changing national and international contexts. The book offers valuable insight into why history matters for understanding China and its global role today.”
— Koji Hirata, Monash University“Dr. Matson's compelling and rigorously researched study demonstrates how China’s rewriting of its WWII history is at the heart of its legitimation battle both domestically and in the international sphere.”
— Maria Repnikova, Georgia State UniversityLicense: CC BY-NC
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