"被遺忘的戰爭":中國人自己的二戰
In Chinese video games (authorised by the state), players slaughter Japanese soldiers from the Sino-Japanese war of 1937-1945. On the sets of Chinese TV dramas, extras playing Japanese soldiers get slaughtered every day. And in geopolitics, China is disputing Japan's sovereignty over some uninhabited rocks in the East China Sea - and soon, perhaps, over Okinawa Island too.
在中國多款電子遊戲（經由政府授權）中，玩家可以在1937年至1945年的“抗日戰爭”中殺戮日本兵。在中國多部電視劇中，扮演日本兵的臨時演員每天都在被屠殺。而在地緣政治中，中國正與日本在中國東海幾個無人居住岩石的主權問題上爭吵不休——也許不久兩國還會就沖繩島產生同樣的爭端。The Chinese have rediscovered “their” second world war. Just as the conflict fades from memory in the west, it has become salient as never before in China. To understand the country today, we need to understand its long-forgotten war, argues Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history and politics at Oxford. Remarkably, his new book is the first full account of the Sino-Japanese war ever published in English.
中國人已經重新發現了“自己的”二戰。就在二戰在西方人的記憶中逐漸淡去的同時，二戰在中國正變得前所未有地清晰。牛津大學中國歷史與政治學教授拉納•米特(Rana Mitter)聲稱，爲理解今日中國，我們需要先理解其經歷的這場長期被遺忘的戰爭。值得一提的是，他的新書是第一本已出版的面解讀抗日戰爭的英文圖書。Perhaps 15 million Chinese died in the conflict, nearly 20 times the number of American and British war dead combined. Yet for decades China's ruling Communists rarely mentioned the war. After all, it hadn't particularly been their war. The Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek was China's main commander. The Communist party acted as his “junior partner”, writes Mitter. Indeed, in Mitter's account Mao Zedong is a relatively minor character, sitting out the war in the backwater of Yan'an. Occasionally Communist soldiers fought the Japanese, but during the war they also intermittently fought the Nationalists.
在二戰中喪生的中國人可能達到1500萬，接近英美兩國二戰死亡總數的20倍。然而幾十年來，作爲執政黨的中國共產黨員很少提及這次戰爭。畢竟，這不是專屬於他們的戰爭。國民黨領導人蔣介石當時是中國的主要指揮官。米特寫道，中共當時是蔣介石的“小夥伴”。實際上，按照米特的說法，毛澤東是個相對次要的人物，當時他躲在延安的窮鄉僻壤裏，靜觀戰局變化。中共的部隊偶爾會與日軍作戰，不過在抗戰期間，他們還不時與國民黨軍打起來。
After Mao won the Chinese civil war in 1949, driving Chiang to Taiwan, he wasn't keen to talk up the feats of his defeated Nationalist enemy. That's why the long Japanese bombing of Nationalist-run Chongqing - China's equivalent of the London Blitz - was quietly remembered in Mao's day only by people who had lived through it.
1949年，毛澤東打贏了中國內戰並把蔣介石趕到了臺灣，此後他並不願過多談及手下敗將國民黨軍在抗戰中的壯舉。正是出於這個原因，在毛澤東統治時代，日本人對國民黨治下的重慶進行的長期轟炸（相當於中國版的倫敦閃擊戰(the London Blitz)）僅僅被那些曾經歷過的人們默默地記在心裏。Westerners all but forgot China's war. Under Mao, China became a closed communist country, whereas Japan was a western ally. Chinese archives were closed. Few western scholars could read Chinese anyway. And so China became, in Mitter's phrase, “the forgotten Allied power”. Westerners similarly undervalued the Soviet war effort until Russian archives opened in the 1990s.
西方人也差點忘掉中國的戰爭。在毛澤東的領導下，中國變成一個封閉的共產主義國家，而日本則成爲西方的盟友。中國的檔案是不公開的。而且就算公開，也沒幾個西方學者能讀懂中文。因此，按照米特的說法，中國成爲“被遺忘的同盟國”。與此類似，西方人也低估了蘇聯人對二戰勝利的貢獻，這種狀況直到上世紀90年代俄羅斯公開檔案才發生改觀。Only in the 1980s did China start to commemorate the Sino-Japanese war as more than just a heroic Mao-led prelude to communist nirvana. In 1985 a museum opened in memory of the Japanese “Rape of Nanjing” of 1937-38 - a slaughter of up to 300,000 people that had never previously much interested the party because it hadn't been there. Today Nanjing is much-discussed in China; rather more so than bigger massacres of Chinese by Chinese, notably Mao's Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
到了上世紀80年代，中國在紀念抗日戰爭時，纔開始不再僅僅把它視爲毛澤東領導中國進入共產主義“天堂”的一首英雄主義序曲。1985年，一座爲銘記在1937到1938年日軍“南京大屠殺”事件中共30萬遇害同胞的紀念館落成開放了。由於南京並非中共領地，這場屠殺在此之前從沒引起過中共多大興趣。如今，南京大屠殺在中國被廣泛討論，其熱烈程度遠遠超過中國人之間更大規模的自相屠殺，特別是毛澤東發起的“大躍進”(Great Leap Forward)和“文化大革命”(Cultural Revolution)。The post-Mao party revived the Sino-Japanese war, mostly because it needed a new ideology to replace communism. That need became urgent after the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989. In a dictatorship, Mitter told me, “There are two things you can do. One is to run the economy really well, and the other is to make people feel nationalistically proud. Nationalism is a very powerful button to press.” Similarly in Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic dropped communism for nationalism.
毛澤東時代過後，中共大張旗鼓地重提抗日戰爭的話題，在很大程度上是因爲需要新的意識形態來取代共產主義。在1989年天安門事件之後，這一需求變得非常迫切。米特在書中告訴我，獨裁統治下“可以做到兩件事。其一是把經濟治理得極其出色，另一件事就是讓人們體會到民族自豪感。民族主義是一種極有影響力的手段。”南斯拉夫與中國的情況相類似，斯洛博丹•米洛舍維奇(Slobodan Milosevic)也用民族主義取代了共產主義。War talk had other uses for the new China. By talking up the shared battle of all Chinese, Communist and Nationalist, the party hoped to woo the Taiwanese. This hasn't always worked. As Mitter says: “Chinese praise for Chiang has coincided with a severe downgrading of shares in Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, where he's now regarded as a dictator who oppressed the people of Taiwan for many years.” War talk also sends a reminder to former western allies: that China, the new “responsible great power”, was with them when it mattered.
在新時代的中國，戰爭話題還有其他用處。中共大量談論所有中國人（包括中共和國民黨）共同參加過的戰爭，希望通過這種方式向臺灣人示好。這種方式並不總是能夠奏效。正如米特所說：“中國人開始讚美蔣介石的時候，蔣介石在臺灣的影響力已嚴重下滑，如今他在臺灣被視爲壓迫臺灣人民多年的獨裁者。”戰爭話題還能向前西方盟國傳遞一種信息：中國這個新的“負責任大國”在關鍵時刻和他們是持有同樣立場的。But in western countries, the second world war is fading into history. The Iraq war was probably the last time ever that an American president (with a bust of Winston Churchill in his office) would invoke shared Allied memories to cajole European countries into joint war. The European Union, built to unite a continent destroyed by war, has lost its sense of mission partly because the war is being forgotten.
然而在西方國家，二戰正湮沒在歷史之中。美國前總統小布什發起的伊拉克戰爭，對於美國總統得以喚起歐洲國家心中的盟軍戰史來調動它們投入共同戰鬥來說，可能是最後一次了。小布什辦公室裏掛着一張溫斯頓•丘吉爾(Winston Churchill)的半身像。歐盟(EU)成立的初衷是爲了令一個遭到戰爭破壞的大洲團結起來，如今它已失去了使命感，部分原因是那場戰爭正在被人遺忘。In China, by contrast, the Sino-Japanese war now looms so large that it sometimes eludes the Communist party's control. Many Chinese citizens show an anti-Japanese fervour that embarrasses the leadership. For instance, Chinese officials generally find Japan's nostalgic rightwing prime minister Shinzo Abe (grandson of a suspected war criminal) a man they can do business with. But many ordinary Chinese get angry when, say, Abe makes tactless comments about the foreign “comfort women” used as sex slaves by Japan's wartime army.
與此形成鮮明對照的是，抗日戰爭的話題如今在中國影響如此之大，以至於有時候甚至超出了中共的控制。許多中國公民都表現出反日傾向，這令領導層十分尷尬。比如，中國官員通常認爲，對於日本那位懷舊的右翼首相安倍晉三(Shinzo Abe)（一位疑似戰犯的外孫）來說，是可以跟他做些交易的。但是，當安倍晉三發表那些關於外國“慰安婦”（這個詞用來指戰時日本軍隊的性奴）的不得體的言論時，許多普通中國人被激怒了。Microbloggers on Weibo, the “Chinese Twitter”, often refer to the Japanese as “dwarf bandits” - a wartime (and Ming-era) insult. Sometimes popular anger goes beyond words. Last September, violent anti-Japanese demonstrations were broken up by Chinese police with water cannons. Popular anger may also be pushing China's new President Xi Jinping to hang tough in his dangerous dispute with Japan over the tiny islands in the East China Sea. Now some Chinese scholars and military officers are even claiming Okinawa for China. The Communist party is riding belligerent nationalism, but it is struggling to stay on the horse.
在“中國版推特(Twitter)”新浪微博(Weibo)上，博主們經常將日本人稱爲“倭寇”，這是明代中日交戰時對日本人的一種蔑稱。有時候，民衆的憤怒不僅僅表現在言語攻擊上。去年9月，民衆發起了暴力反日示威活動，隨後被持水槍的警察驅散了。民衆的憤怒，可能也還迫使中國新任國家主席習近平在與日本在圍繞中國東海幾個小島的危險爭端中保持強硬立場。如今部分中國學者及軍官甚至宣稱沖繩的主權也屬於中國。中共正駕馭着一匹民族主義的烈馬，而它要保證不從馬背上摔下來卻十分困難。
