The Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo (Tobunken) will host a lecture by Dr. Emily Matson (George Washington University) on “Memorializing the Mukden Incident: Northeastern Scholars and China's New World War II Timeline” on December 18 (Wed).
This seminar will be held in-person and online, and will be conducted in English. Registration is required.
Date and Time: December 18 (Wed), 2024, at 2:00pm-4:00pm, JST
Venue: The University of Tokyo, Hongo Campus, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, 3F Conference Room No. 1, and online via Zoom.
Lecture Title: “Memorializing the Mukden Incident: Northeastern Scholars and China's New World War II Timeline”
Speaker: Dr. Emily Matson, Lecturer at Georgetown University
Emily Matson teaches undergraduate and graduate courses at Georgetown University and the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. on the history and politics of 20th century China, Japan, and Korea. She is a Kellen term member for the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and a former Wilson Center China fellow, and received her doctorate in history from the University of Virginia. Professor Matson is finalizing her first book, which will be published with the University of Michigan Press on Manchuria and China's historical memory of World War II. Her research interests include World War II, Sino-Japanese relations, museums, political theory/ideology, and Manchuria. In her spare time, Professor Matson enjoys practicing her language skills - she is fluent in Mandarin Chinese as well as Spanish, and is working on her Japanese proficiency.
Lecture Abstract:
In early January of 2017, the People's Republic of China's Ministry of Education made an unprecedented announcement: the starting date for China's World War II, known domestically as the War of Resistance against Japan, would be shifted back 6 years. Instead of starting with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937, as was widely assumed previously, the war would now start with the Mukden Incident on September 18, 1931 with the Japanese Kwantung Army's invasion of Manchuria. Although it would be easy to write off the new official policy as a strictly top-down affair, however, the reality was more complex. Starting in the 1980s, a number of regional historians, particularly from China's Northeast, clamored for a 14-year timeline to encompass the invasion of their homeland. In my research, I examine this regional scholarship alongside rebuttals in favor of the 8-year war timeline that resulted in a robust "date debate" from the 1990s through 2015. In addition, I argue that the Chinese Communist Party had several powerful incentives to rewrite the war's timeline: domestically, this strengthened the Party's overall legitimizing narrative, while internationally, it enhanced the Party's reputation as a responsible geopolitical player on the global stage.
Moderator: Ryo Sahashi, Associate Professor, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the University of Tokyo.
Registration: Please register from the link below by December 16 at 12:00pm,JST
https://forms.gle/aAAfsUdr8dehuSiv5
Contact: Kyoko Kotari (Prof. Ryo Sahashi’s office, kotari[at]ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp)
*This seminar is co-sponsored by JSPS Kakenhi Project “The Historical Process of Development of the East Asian International Order: The Connection of Non-Western International Relations Theory and Area Studies” (24K00224)