Brahma Chellaney

History as a barrier to charting a better future
Brahma Chellaney *Abstract
The official history of any nation, however big or small, embodies a blend of fact and fiction.
Besides such politicized construction of history, Asia must also deal with harmful historicallegacies, revisionist history, and territorial revisionism that are threatening its peace andeconomic renaissance. The squabbles over history and remembrance have already cast along shadow over Asiaʼs extraordinary rise. Yet history problems are only intensifying, withgrowing nationalism among the major actors fueling disputes over everything from territoryand natural resources to war memorials and textbooks. The time is overdue to draw a line
under the past. Nations in the region must find ways to commemorate their past withoutalienating, insulting, or offending their neighbors. Asian nations cannot change the past, butthey can strive to shape a more cooperative future ̶ without, of course, forgetting historyʼslessons.

IntroductionEver since Japan rose dramatically as an economic powerhouse in the 1970s, analysts
have predicted the arrival of the “Asian centur y.” However, histor y, often linked tocolonialism or past aggressions, remains a barrier. A potent mix of domestic politics,
growing geopolitical competition, and militar y tensions has turned histor y into adriver of corrosive nationalism. Conflicting historical memories and narratives constitute oneof the biggest impediments to political reconciliation.1 This holds long-term ramifications for
Asia, including its continued ability to spearhead global economic growth and gain centrality ininternational relations.
Make no mistake: whatever historians may say, history is never an objective chronicle. It is
not uncommon for countries to create self-serving, sanitized narratives about their past to purge
the wrongs they inflicted on others and to portray their historical opponents as rapacious foes
always at fault. Many nations, in fact, openly blend historical fact with myth. As George Orwell
said, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
Let us be clear: history is written by the victors. Japan, as a nation vanquished in World War II,
remains under pressure to this day to make amends for its colonial history and activities during
the war. However, there is no similar pressure on Britain, France, and other colonial powers thatemerged victorious in that war, whose outcome shaped the current international institutional
structure. The victorsʼ atrocities in their colonies and during World War II, for example, have
* Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at Center for Policy Research (CPR)1

Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel C. Sneider (eds.), History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia: Divided Memories(London, Routledge, 2013).

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been whitewashed or simply forgotten.

The politicization of national commemoration

The squabbles over history and remembrance in Asia are particularly worrisome because they
cast a long shadow over the region, reinforcing negative stereotypes of rival nations and helping
to rationalize claims to territories long held by other states. With attempts to rewrite or sugarcoat
history persisting to this day, history remains a principal obstacle to enduring peace and stability
in Asia.
The paradox is that East Asiaʼs history problems have been intensifying lately, with growing
nationalism among major actors such as China, Japan, and South Korea fueling disputes overeverything from territory and natural resources to war memorials and history textbooks. These
bitter disputes over issues of historical memory are poisoning relations.
Take national commemoration, which is usually linked with national identity. Erecting
memorials to newfound heroes is inciting greater regional rancor and recrimination. 2 Indeed,inter-country squabbles in Asia over remembrance are threatening to sow fragmentation andinstability. They have also fueled Asiaʼs more recent territorial disputes. The fact is that thepoliticization of history, including through textbook revisions along nationalist lines, makes itvery difficult to establish institutionalized regional collaboration.
How did Yasukuni, a stately Shinto shrine in the heart of Tokyo, become the center of aninternational controversy? For an answer, it is more instructive to look not so much at thepresent but recognize how rival states in East Asia are using history as a geopolitical instrument.
Moreover, unresolved historical grievances have constricted the diplomatic space for building
reconciliation among China, Japan and South Korea. It is in this atmosphere of nationalist
grandstanding over conflicting historical narratives in East Asia that Yasukuni has become anoversized issue.
Yasukuni, built in the 19th century to honor Japanʼs war dead, enshrines the spirits ̶ not thebones or ashes ̶ of Japanʼs 2.5 million war dead. It is not widely known overseas that Yasukuni
honors Japanʼs war dead not just from World War II but also from earlier wars extending fromthe Satsuma Rebellion to World War I, when Japan was allied with the United States. Among
the World War II dead the shrine honors are 14 individuals who were convicted as Class A war
criminals by a military tribunal established by the World War II victors. The 14 include Hideki
Tojo, the prime minister who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor largely in response to the U.S.
oil, steel and scrap-metal embargoes on Japan. The Pacific War was triggered not just by Imperial
Japanʼs frenzy of territorial conquests but also by U.S. sanctions on Japan. As the U.S. politicalscientist Graham Allison has said in the context of the present U.S.-China tensions, “Could a trade
conflict become a hot war that ends with nuclear explosions? As preposterous as that may sound,remember that Japanʼs attack on Pearl Harbor happened after the United States imposed crippling
sanctions on Japan, bringing this country into a war that ended with atomic bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.”3
In keeping with the dictum that history is written by the winners, the so-called International
Militar y Tribunal for the Far East (which was established by a charter issued by U.S. Army
General Douglas MacAr thur) delivered “ victors ʼ justice, ” with its proceedings tainted byextreme arbitrariness not seen at the Nürnberg trials in Germany. In fact, one of the tribunalʼsjustices, Radhabinod Pal of India, dissented from the other judges to contend that the trials wereconducted unfairly as an exercise in retribution by the victors. While the Nürnberg tribunal tried
2

Hiro Saito, The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia (Honolulu: Universityof Hawaii Press, 2016).

3

Graham Allison, “How Trump and Chinaʼs Xi Could Stumble Into War,” Washington Post, March 31, 2017.

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Brahma Chellaney

twenty-two Nazi leaders, including one in absentia, and convicted nineteen of them, the trials
under MacArthurʼs charter lasted two years (more than twice as long), with all the twenty-five
Japanese defendants convicted. Seven of them were sentenced to hang, sixteen were given life
imprisonment, and two were sentenced to lesser terms. However, with the Cold War heating up,
the U.S. occupation authorities in Japan by 1958 pardoned or paroled the remaining convicts,
further undercutting the credibility of the original trials (several of the convicts had died ofnatural causes earlier in prison). Today, Palʼs sculpture adorns the gardens of Yasukuni.
It was only in 1978 that the names of the fourteen “war criminals” were added to the list at
Yasukuni, which memorializes the collective memory of the fallen soldiers, and it was not until
1985, after more than twenty post-war visits by prime ministers to Yasukuni, that China raised the
Yasukuni issue in the wake of then Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasoneʼs official visit to the shrine
to pray for peace and for the souls of the war dead. Nakasone turned what previously had been
private visits to the shrine into an official visit as part of a pledge to make a “final accounting” of
the taboos of Japanʼs postwar era. Not only were funds from the national treasury used to pay
for the flowers that Nakasone placed at Yasukuni, but also he signed the shrineʼs visitor bookas “Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone,” unlike previous visits, when he had signed as “a man
named Yasuhiro Nakasone who is prime minister.”4
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, for his part, had long held back from visiting the Yasukuni Shrine.
Abe did not pray at Yasukuni during his first stint as prime minister from 2006-2007. However, Abefound little reason to restrain himself after Beijing in November 2013 aggressively established an
air defense identification zone (ADIZ) that usurped international airspace over the East China Sea
and covered the Senkaku Islands (which China claims sovereignty over but does not control).
Abeʼs visit to Yasukuni in late 2013 was also a way to assert Japanʼs right to independence fromexternal pressure, and it inflamed nationalistic passions in China and South Korea.
To China and South Korea, Yasukuni remains a spiritual symbol of Japanʼs prewar militarism,
with its adjoining Y ū sh ū kan war-histor y museum promoting the view that Japan waged
aggression in Asia to liberate it from European colonial rule. Many foreigners contend that themuseum presents a revisionist interpretation of twentieth-century history to portray Japan as thevictim in order to rationalize its militaristic past. However, it is often overlooked that in contrast
to war museums in a number of other countries, like Musée de lʼArmée at Les Invalides in Paris,
France, the Yūshūkan is a strictly private museum not officially endorsed by the state; it isadministered by the Shinto organization that is in charge of Yasukuni. Since the end of the war,
there is a strict separation between the state and religion in Japan that forbids the government
from interfering or intervening in religious affairs.
All this, however, cannot obscure a key question: even if Japan still needs to atone for its
past actions, doesnʼt it have the same right today as other nations to honor its citizens killed in
World War II and the wars before? All nations, after all, honor their war dead, even if they were
the aggressors, plundering distant lands, as European colonial powers did. The United Stateshonors those who died fighting its wars of aggression, including in Vietnam and its decade-longoccupation of Iraq.
Even as the values of pacifism and rejection of war remain largely dominant in todayʼs Japan,
the Japanese culture, with its martial traditions, places a high premium on honoring the war dead,with the spirits of the fallen soldiers deified. Indeed, the valor of Japanese soldiers is instilledby the belief that, even if they die in battle, they will live on in spirit. In the absence of any othercommemorative monument, Yasukuni ser ves as Japanʼs war memorial. Japanese politicians,
especially those on the political right, like to compare Yasukuni with the Arlington National
Cemetery outside Washington D.C. that also honors and memorializes the war dead.
4

Sam Jameson, “Nakasoneʼs Visit to Wartime Shrine Criticized,” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1985.

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History as a barrier to charting a better future

Given that a prime ministerial visit to Yasukuni now ignites nationalistic passions in China
and South Korea, would these countries accept an alternative war memorial in Japan? What if
Tokyo proposed building a national war memorial where Japanʼs leaders could pay respects tothe collective memor y of the fallen soldiers without igniting international controversy? Sucha proposal would most likely come under immediate attack from China and South Korea as a
new Japanese project to honor past militarism. In other words, no war memorial, given Japanʼs
imperialist history, would be free of controversy in todayʼs geopolitical environment.
Another classic example of resurgent history issues linked to colonialism is the century-old
case of Korean activist Ahn Jung-geun. The case exemplifies historyʼs divisive hold. Considered aterrorist in Japan, where Ahn was hanged, but a hero in South and North Korea, Ahn assassinated a
top Japanese leader, Hirobumi Ito, in 1909 at the Harbin Railway Station in China. Ito was a highly
decorated, four-time Japanese prime minister and the first resident-general of Japanese-ruled
Korea. In recent years, that case has resurfaced after China opened a memorial hall at the Harbin
Railway Station in 2014 to commemorate Ahn. Indeed, as if to cement Ahnʼs status as a hero in
Korea,5 his image has appeared on a 200-won postage stamp in South Korea, while Itoʼs image
can be seen on Japanʼs 1,000-yen note.6
The new Ahn memorial in Harbin is actually part of the larger geopolitical tug of war in East
Asia. The hall was built at the suggestion of South Koreaʼs now-impeached president, Park Geun
Hye, during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the summer of 2013. Xi, seizing theopportunity to drive a wedge between Americaʼs two main Asian allies, quickly built the memorial
to Ahn. Japan responded by blasting China for lionizing a terrorist and propagating a “onesided” view of history ̶ a move that, Japan asserted, was “not conducive to building peace andstability.”7
The irony is that China, while por traying the Yasukuni Shrine as a symbol of Japanʼ sunrepentant view of past militarism, found no contradiction in opening a memorial hall honoringan assassin. “History is the teacher of life,” Chinaʼs official news agency, Xinhua, said on theoccasion of the opening of the memorial glorifying a murderer.8 “With Japan treading a dangerous
path once again, the need for vigilance and a joint international effort is clear if we are to prevent
a Japanese militarist resurgence,” it added. The construction of the Ahn memorial has been
likened by some to building a statute in Dallas to President John F. Kennedyʼs killer, Lee Harvey
Oswald.9
The Ahn memorial ̶ intentionally designed to be antagonistic to Japan ̶ is just one exampleof how national commemoration can be manipulated to serve narrow geopolitical agendas. Of
course, there is no dearth of cases where one countryʼs heroes are villains for another.

Varied experiences, varied reactions

If one examines China, South Korea, India, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia, it is apparent
that national feelings and reactions to historical, especially colonial, experiences vary significantly
across the Asian region.
South Korea, where hyper-nationalism is also a way to erase the memories of close
cooperation of the Korean elites with Japanese colonial rulers, has sought to purge all vestiges
of Japanese colonial rule. On both sides of the divided Korean Peninsula, Korean nationalism
is roused by a common factor ̶ a deep sense of historical victimization by larger powers that
5

Ahn Jung-geunʼs image on 200-won postage stamp, https://goo.gl/4EkgfX.

6

Bank of Japan, “Banknotes, The Bank's Treasury Funds and JGS Services,” https://goo.gl/joqd5X.

7

Alastair Gale, “Chinese Shrine to Korean Assassin Irks Japan,” Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2014.

8

Xinhua, “Memorial of Korean Patriot, Reminder of History,” January 19, 2014.

9

Jennifer Lind, “When History Humiliates Former Enemies,” CNN, January 3, 2014.

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Brahma Chellaneytreated Korea in the past as a vassal state or even annexed it during different periods of its
history. North Korea boycotted the 1988 Summer Olympics because they were held in Seoul, yetsuch is the underlying cross-border Korean nationalism that people in one Korea cheer for theother Korea when it competes with any other country, especially Japan. Against this background,South Korea still insists that Japan address lingering issues over its annexation of Korea morethan 100 years ago.
Not all Asian countries, however, seek to obliterate their colonial pasts. They include thePhilippines, Singapore, and Indonesia, which were also victims of Japanese aggression. India,
which fell prey to British colonialism, has also largely moved on.
In fact, India continues to transact much of its key government business from British-era
edifices, and some of its major criminal and civil laws date from the colonial period. In fact, after
independence, India voluntarily adopted British-style parliamentary democracy, although thissystem is rife with inefficiencies and other drawbacks, as the experiences of not only India but
also Britain show just in recent years. The parliamentary system might suit a small, homogenous
nation but, in a large, diverse country like India, it is at the root of many political ills, besides
fostering a fractious polity. It speaks for itself that the U.S. occupying authorities imposed aparliamentary system on Japan, rather than the American-style presidential system. This wasdone apparently in order to preclude a strong federal government in charge of Japanʼs destiny.
The U.S. president has immense executive powers and can, for example, tear up long-standing
trade agreements or wage wars in secret, without Congress and the courts being able to stop him.
By contrast, the parliamentary system has fostered coalition governments in India and elsewhere.
Whether it be from strength or weakness, the fact is that India has long declined to hold any
grudge against Britain for its nearly 200 years of colonial exploitation and plunder of the Indian
subcontinent. Around the start of the 18th century, as the Mughal Empire began to gradually
fragment across the subcontinent ̶ a development that led to European imperial powers initiallyeyeing India and then intervening, one by one ̶ Indiaʼs share of world GDP stood at 27 percent,according to the British economist Angus Maddison.10
When the British seized India, India was clearly one of the richest societies in the world. Not
surprisingly, the British labeled India, with its size and wealth, as the “jewel in the crown” of the
British Empire. By the time the British left India, though, they had reduced it to one of the world ʼspoorest. According to Maddison, Indiaʼs share of the global GDP stood at just 3.8 percent in
1950, just after independence.11 In the words of the award-winning Indian author Shashi Tharoor,“The British conquered one of the richest countries in the world and reduced it, after over two
centuries of looting and exploitation, to one of the poorest, most diseased, and most illiterate
countries by 1947.”12
Britainʼs brutal colonial past in India included engineering a famine in Bengal that led tomillions of deaths, punitive expeditions, scorched-earth policies, and even concentration camps.13
By diverting Indian resources to support Britainʼs role in World War II, Winston Churchill
not only presided over the hideous Bengal famine in 1943 that left some three million Indiansdead, but he also mocked the Indian suffering, saying the starvation was “merrily” culling the10

Angus Maddison, The Economic and Social Impact of Colonial Rule in India in Class Structure andEconomic Growth: India & Pakistan since the Moghuls (London: Routledge, 2006), chapter 3.

11

Angus Maddison, The Economic and Social Impact of Colonial Rule in India in Class Structure andEconomic Growth: India & Pakistan since the Moghuls (London: Routledge, 2006), chapter 3.

12Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India (New Delhi: Aleph Book Company,
2016).

13

Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during
World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

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History as a barrier to charting a better future

Indian population.14 In truth, this was a major atrocity, but since Churchill was on the side thatwon World War II, the blood on his hands mattered little in the victorsʼ historical narrative thatprevailed globally with the war triumph.
In this light, it is remarkable that India, which prides itself as the worldʼs largest democracy,
remains a member of the Britain-led Commonwealth of Nations. Indiaʼs equanimity and lack ofrancor vis-à-vis Britain stand in stark contrast to South Koreaʼs unforgiveness about its suffering
under Japanʼs colonialism. Like India, Taiwan ̶ a former Japanese colony ̶ also displays a moretolerant view of its period of colonial subjugation.
China, for its part, still harps on its “century of humiliation” and colonial degradation thatbegan with Britainʼs victory over Manchu-ruled China in the First Opium War in 1839. In this“century of humiliation,” Western powers intervened and imposed unequal treaties on the Qing
dynasty in Beijing and Imperial Japan invaded and occupied parts of China. Sun Yat-sen, whofounded the Republic of China, once said that Chinaʼs nineteenth-century fate was worse thanIndiaʼs because “India was the favored wife of Britain while China was the common prostitute of
all the foreign powers.”15 In reality, the Qing dynasty was not Han Chinese; it was established in
the seventeenth century by the Manchus who seized Beijing. Remaining in power until the earlytwentieth century, the Qing conquered the lands of other non-Han Chinese people, trebling thesize of the empireʼs territory as compared with the preceding Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Like theMughal integration in India, the Qing respected the Confucian political tradition and Sinicized
non-Chinese minorities in their empire, even as their rule left a “Manchufied” imprint on Chinesepolitics and society.
Still, Chinaʼs experiences under Japanese and Western colonialism were a key factor in
the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, which convinced many Chinese that only it could
restore the countryʼs pride and which today still harps on its “heroic” role in “the peopleʼs War
of Resistance against the Japanese aggression.” The paradox here is that China today is itself
using colonial-era principles to create a Sino-sphere of client or tributary states. With the intent
to corner natural resources in distant lands, dump goods in their markets, and serve its otherinterests, it is employing predatory finance to ensnare states in a debt trap. In essence, this is animperial project aimed at making real the mythical Middle Kingdom.
Since coming to power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party has unfailingly played thehistory card to instill fear in Chinese society of foreign powers encircling China. As its ideologicalunderpinnings have eroded, it has made ultra-nationalism the legitimating credo of its monopoly
on power. Just as the United States presents itself as the worldʼs indispensable nation, the Chinese
Communist Party ̶ inflating Chinaʼs past achievements and capitalizing on the countr yʼs
dramatic economic rise since the 1990s ̶ presents China as central to global economics, politics,
and culture. According to the Harvard University academic Graham Allison, China and the UnitedStates today share one similarity: “Both have extreme superiority complexes. Each sees itself as
without peers.”16
Indeed, no country plays the history card with as much relish and ingenuity as China. In
recent years, for example, it has sought to draw attention to the atrocities committed by theImperial Japanese Army before and during World War II. Through government projects andsubsidies, China, among other things, has expanded and renovated war museums memorializing
Japanʼs 1931-1945 invasions. As though to stir its people into a frenzy of patriotism, China in 2015
14

Sheila Musaji, “Winston Churchillʼs Bigoted Statements Prove Nothing,” The Muslim American, June 9,
2013.

15

Shivshankar Menon, “The China Conundrum,” ICS Analysis (May 2016).

16

Graham Allison, “How Trump and Chinaʼs Xi Could Stumble into War,” Washington Post, March 31,
2017.

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introduced two new national memorial days to commemorate Chinaʼs long battle against Japaneseaggression in World War II: “War against Japanese Aggression Victory Day” on September 3 and“Nanjing Massacre Day” on December 13 (Japanese troops captured Nanking, or Nanjing, on
December 13, 1937, and Japan officially surrendered to the Allied Powers on September 2, 1945).
China has also other days dedicated to remembrance of its long conflict with Japan, including
September 18, which marks the day Japanese forces entered Shenyang city, opening the path to awider Japanese takeover of northeast China.
Such is Chinaʼs widespread politicization of history that its official calendar, to be clear, isalso dotted with days of commemoration for events and causes not linked with Japan. Suchnational days are not public holidays; rather the commemoration is marked by feisty speeches
and essays. Yet no issue better illustrates Chinaʼs use of history to whip up nationalism at homethan Japan. For example, as the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II approached in 2015,
China announced a grand military parade in Beijing on September 3, with the Communist Partyʼsmouthpiece, the Peopleʼs Daily, saying the parade would display China's military prowess and17“make Japan tremble.” An increasingly muscular China, however, is rattling not only Japan but
also its other neighbors.
What if the victims of Chinaʼs aggressions since 1949, such as Vietnam and India, emulated
its example by dedicating days to commemorate Chinese attacks on them? China, while seeking
to obscure its own aggressions and occupations since the communist “revolution,” including the1951 annexation of the sprawling Tibetan Plateau and invasions of India and Vietnam in 1962 and1979, respectively, has long called on Japan to “take history as a mirror” and demonstrate greater
remorse for its past aggressions. Should India designate October 20 as the “Day of Infamy” toremind itself of the lessons from the Chinese trans-Himalayan invasion, which began on that day
in 1962?
In fact, China illustrates how historical denial is unabashedly selective. The Chinese
Communist Party, for instance, seeks to shore up its legitimacy by harping on Japanʼs pre-WorldWar II militarism but denying Chinaʼs own post-1949 aggressions. A visit to the Military Museumin Beijing shows how China employs revisionist history both to portray itself as the victim evenwhen it initiated war (such as against India and Vietnam) and to rationalize its assertive territorial
claims today. Such is the enforced historical amnesia about China ʼs invasions of India andVietnam that few Chinese know about the attacks.
A Pentagon report has cited examples of how China engaged in military preemption in 1950,
1962, 1969, and 1979 in the name of strategic defense. The report, released in 2010, stated: “Thehistory of modern Chinese warfare provides numerous case studies in which Chinaʼs leaders
have claimed military preemption as a strategically defensive act. For example, China refers to its
intervention in the Korean War (1950–53) as the ʻWar to Resist the United States and Aid Korea.ʼ
Similarly, authoritative texts refer to border conflicts against India (1962), the Soviet Union (1969),
and Vietnam (1979) as ʻSelf-Defense Counter Attacks.ʼ”18 All these cases of preemption occurred
when China was weak, poor, and internally torn, so Chinaʼs rapidly accumulating power today
naturally raises legitimate concerns in Asia. Indeed, Chinaʼs seizure of the Paracel Islands from
Vietnam in 1974, its 1995 capture of the Mischief Reef from the Philippines, and its 2012 seizureof the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines are also examples of offense as defense.
Take Cambodia: while China insists that Japan “shoulder the historical responsibilities forcrimes committed by past generations,” as Chinese Premier Li Keqiang put it in 2015, Beijingʼs
17Franz-Stefan Gady, “Parades to Fear, Not Celebrate, “New York Times, March 20, 2015.

18

U.S. Department of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China
2010, Report to Congress Pursuant to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010
(Washington, D.C.: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2010), 24.

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message to Cambodia is to forget the past. The reason? China has yet to acknowledge its role in
one of the worst genocides in post-World War II history. In the 1970s, as part of the Mao Zedonginitiated effort to carve out a client state in the context of serious Sino-Soviet ideological conflict.
China aided the rise to power of the Marxist leader Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, adevelopment that led to mass starvation and mass slaughter. The brutal regime was overthrownby invading Vietnamese forces in 1979 but not before the Khmer Rouge claimed the lives of up to
two million people in just four years of rule. Beijing, however, continued to recognize the Khmer
Rouge as the legitimate rulers of Cambodia until 1992.
The Chinese Communist Partyʼs gory history is also apparent from the domestic pogroms that
occurred in the first decades of its own rule. Yet political power in China still rests with the same
party and system responsible for the death of tens of millions of Chinese during the so-called
Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and other state-induced disasters. The decade-long
Cultural Revolution upheaval claimed the lives of one million or more Chinese, including Chinaʼshead of state, Liu Shaoqi, who died in custody in 1969 after two years of abuse. The death tollfrom the Cultural Revolution could have been as high as eight million, according to Song Yongyi,
who served five years in prison in that period and became a scholar of the Cultural Revolution ̶a research focus that led to a second incarceration in 1999 for stealing “state secrets.”19
In fact, it was Maoʼs quest to subdue nature that precipitated the greatest genocide in modern
world history ̶ the “Great Leap Forward,” a forced attempt at the collectivization of agriculturaland industrial output that helped create one of the worldʼs worst famines between 1958 and 1961.
Some 36 million people perished (more than three times the number killed in World War I) in
the supposed Great Leap Forward, according to the well-researched 2008 book Tombstone by
longtime Chinese communist Yang Jisheng.20 However, a Western scholar, Frank Dikötter, whoaccessed the Chinese Communist Partyʼs files relating to the horror, estimates that the Great
Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.21
Add to the picture the ruthless crushing of student-led, pro-democracy demonstrators at
Beijingʼs Tiananmen Square in 1989. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians were killedin the Tiananmen massacre, Chinaʼs most significant political event in a generation. That theCommunist Party continues to monopolize power despite its past gor y excesses indeed isremarkable. China is now the oldest autocracy in the world. As an international newspaper put it,“Its constant demands that Japan square up to the past would be more convincing if it were not so
wantonly dishonest about its own bloodstained history.”22
As for Japan, its historical narrative is complex and difficult, especially in relation to China andSouth Korea, because in the last century Japan was a victor and a loser, as well as an oppressor
and a victim. It was a colonizer, yet between 1945 and 1952 it was occupied by the United States.
That occupation period has greatly shaped Japanʼs political, economic, and educational systems. It
is extraordinary that Japan has not changed one word to this day in its U.S.-imposed Constitution,although constitutional reform is linked to national-security reform and national-security reform,in turn, is linked to the countryʼs changing security environment.
To be sure, Japanʼs history problem with its neighbors goes back much farther than WorldWar II. Japan decisively defeated Manchu-ruled China in 1895, only to be defeated and occupiedby the United States fifty years later. In between those two great wars, Japan colonized Korea and19

Verna Yu, “'Enemy of the People' Historian Song Yongyi Gives as Good as He Gets,” South China
Morning Post, February 19, 2013.

20

Yang Jisheng, Tombstone (Mùbēi), in Mandarin, vols. 1 and 2 (Hong Kong, 2008). The book has notbeen translated into English thus far. It has been banned in mainland China.

21

Frank Dikötter, “Maoʼs Great Leap to Famine,” New York Times, December 15, 2010.

22

Financial Times, “Asia Should Focus More on the Future Than the Past” (editorial), August 16, 2015.

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invaded Manchuria and China, following the model of Western colonial powers of the time. It isthus no surprise that the baggage of history seriously weighs down Japanʼs relations with China
and the two Koreas.
Even the Chinese-Korean relationship has a histor y problem, as underscored by Chinaʼsrevisionist historical claim to the ancient kingdom of Kogur yo, founded in the Tongge Riverbasin of northern Korea. This claim prompted U.S. Senate Republican staff members to warn
in a December 2012 report that Beijing “may be seeking to lay the groundwork for possible
future territorial claims on the Korean peninsula.”23 The Koguryo kingdom bestrode the period
before and after Christ and, at its height, included much of Manchuria. The posting of the claimby the Chinese foreign ministry in 2004 was seen as an attempt to hedge Chinaʼs options with apotentially unified Korea.

The factors at play

What explains the fact that China harps on the colonial ravages it suffered, South Korea is prone
to dredging up historical grievances, and India, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia are moretolerant of their colonial pasts? Domestic politics, educational systems, regional geopolitics, andother factors contribute to these varying reactions in the different countries about their colonial
experiences.
The fact is that, in an economically integrated but politically divided Asia, relations between
many countries remain trapped in a mutually reinforcing loop: the baggage of history weighs
down interstate relationships, with poor political relations, in turn, helping to magnify andaccentuate the history problem, thus reinforcing inter-country ties being held hostage to history.
There are at least three reasons why history issues have resurfaced with a vengeance in Asia.
The first factor is that, within a few years of World War IIʼs end, Asia fell into a Cold War freeze
that precluded any serious discussion on history. Such a discussion became possible only after
the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet blocs ended. The end of the Cold War was actuallyfollowed by the start of Asiaʼs own cold war and the disinterring of the ghosts of history.
A second factor is Asiaʼs economic rise. The vicious circle in which many Asian states findthemselves has a clear catalyst: Asiaʼs rising prosperity. As their economies have expanded, Asian
countries have gained the confidence to construct and exalt a new past, in which they either
downplay their own aggressions or highlight their resoluteness in the face of brutal victimization.
This trend, by letting loose the demons of nationalism, has helped resurrect ugly questions ofhistory.
The third factor is underlined by the rise of a powerful, revisionist China that plays the history
card to justify its territorial creep in the South and East China seas and the Himalayas. China
currently has unresolved land or sea border disputes with 11 of its neighbors, including one of
the worldʼs smallest nations, Bhutan, and its technical ally North Korea. In all the cases, Chinaʼsclaims are based not on international law but on purported histor y, including the contention
that its merchants or sailors “got there first” or that Tibet enjoyed ecclesial or tutelary links withcertain territories in the past. By building mega-dams and other hydro engineering structures in
its borderlands, China is also disturbing the status quo on the cross-border flows of Asiaʼs majorrivers, which originate on the Tibetan Plateau.
To make matters worse, China has incurred no international costs for its revisionist activities
or even for flouting the 2016 ruling of an international arbitral tribunal, which knocked the bottom

23

Chico Harlan, “China Might Block Eventual Korean Unification, Report Says,” Washington Post, January
18, 2013.

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History as a barrier to charting a better futureout of its expansive claims in the South China Sea.24 In fact, Beijing has publicly ridiculed thetribunalʼs ruling, which held that China has no legal or historical basis to claim the South China
Sea. Through its contempt for the ruling, China is saying that it should be the judge in its own
cause. More significantly, it also highlights a “might makes right” strategy that aims to extend
Chinese control to strategic areas and resources by gradually altering the status quo. The strategy
focuses on a steady progression of steps to create new facts on the ground by confounding andoutwitting neighbors while avoiding a confrontation with the United States, which sees itself as ageographically non-resident power in Asia.
To be sure, Asiaʼs history problem extends beyond China. In fact, all countriesʼ legitimizing
narratives blend historical fact and myth. In some cases, though, historical legacies can gain
excessive influence over present policies to the extent of overwhelming the capacity of leaders
to make rational policy choices. Historical grievances should not be allowed to trump mutual
economic and security interests between any two countries.
That histor y continues to hinder relations even between democracies is apparent fromthe strained relations between Americaʼs closest allies in East Asia ̶ South Korea and Japan.
South Korea clings to the past while Japan wishes to forget the past. Japan believes that it has
acknowledged and apologized sufficiently for its war crimes, and that it is now time to move on.
South Korea vehemently disagrees with that position. For example, the now-impeached former
South Korean president, Park Geun Hye, called on Japan to face up to the historical truth byresolving the “comfort women” issue ̶ referring to the sexual exploitation of Korean (and other)
women by the Imperial Japanese Army. Indeed, Ms. Park persisted in raking up the past even at
the expense of the bilateral relationship.

Beyond the histor y spats

In Europe, the more time that has passed from the bloody wars in the first half of the twentiethcentur y, the more the historical animosities and ill will have lessened between traditionallyrival countries. In Asia, paradoxically, the opposite is true: since the end of World War II, theantagonisms have only intensified with the passage of time, resulting in diplomatic relationships
being held hostage to history. As a result, the history problem is now more dangerous than it has
been for years.
Asian states have two ways essentially to deal with their history problems. One way can becalled the minimalist or self-restraint approach, involving mutual commitments not to disturb
the status quo or rake up historical grievances. Avoiding provocative statements or actions is theessence of this approach. The other way is a more challenging proactive approach, pivoted on
initiating concrete healing. Such constructive action centers on building historic reconciliation
through negotiations and by enhancing mutual trust.
Either approach is possible only if Asian states are willing to come to terms with history or atleast to stop resurrecting the ghosts of history. Without sincere efforts to step out of the shadowsof histor y, squabbles over remembrance, textbooks, and other issues will continue to spur
competing and mutually reinforcing nationalisms and foster tensions and instability in bilateralrelationships.25 Such feuds will also be used to justify efforts to disturb the territorial or maritime
status quo. To help build new bridges across the interstate divides, the politicization of history
24

Permanent Court of Arbitration, Award by the Arbitral Tribunal in the Matter of the South China Sea
Arbitration, PCA Case No. 2013-19, July 12, 2016, https://goo.gl/twe9Nn.

25

See Mikyoung Kim (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Memory and Reconciliation in East Asia (Oxon, U.K.:
Routledge, 2016); Gerrit W. Gong (ed.), Memory and History in East and Southeast Asia: Issues of Identity
in International Relations (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2001); andJun-Hyeok Kwak and Melissa Nobles (eds.), Inherited Responsibility and Historical Reconciliation in
East Asia (Oxon, U.K.: Routledge, 2013).

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Brahma Chellaneymust stop.
Breaking out of the vicious cycle fostered by the histor y problems, of course, demands
forward-looking governments and the will to pursue political reconciliation. Through sincere
efforts, the adverse impacts of historical grievances and claims on bilateral relationships can be
minimized. Honoring one countryʼs heroes and history, for example, can be done without seeking
to provoke, humiliate, or rub salt in the wounds of another nation. Nations should find ways tocommemorate their past without alienating, insulting, or offending their neighbors.
It is past time to draw a line under the past. Asian nations cannot change the past, but they can
strive to shape a more cooperative future ̶ without forgetting historyʼs lessons. To focus moreon the future than the past, they should heed the wisdom of a pithy Russian proverb, “Forget thepast and lose an eye; dwell on the past and lose both eyes.”

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