The Enemy Who Never Went Away: Memory, Nationalism and China's Japan Policy During the Cold War

ABSTRACT This study reassesses the relationship between war memory, nationalism and Sino–Japanese relations during the Cold War. Contrary to the dominant view in existing scholarship that China's nationalist remembering of the war emerged during the 1980s and 1990s, this article, drawing on an extensive survey of the People's Daily , demonstrates that war memory was actively employed in China's foreign policy discourse on Japan from 1949 to 1972. It challenges the ‘collective amnesia’ and ‘communism‐over‐nationalism’ theses by showing that foreign policy discourse functioned as a key arena for the production of memory and nationalist narratives during the Mao era. It contributes to the literature by uncovering a long‐neglected side of memory, nationalism and Sino–Japanese relations.