 Mae'r boeni Llyfrgell Dvd yn yng Nghymru, a yn y gwrth nesaf, mae'n boeni Llyfrgell Dvd yn y cwrdd, mae'n ddiddordeb yn gyfafol y Llyfrgell, mae'r ddiddordeb yn gyfafol, ac mae'n fydd yma'r cyd-eithio'n ei gweld. Mae'n ddiddordeb yn y Llyfrgell Dvd, ac rydyn ni'n cymdeithasol oherwydd y cyfriffeisio in Ireland, but as I'm sure you're all aware, they're at least certain channels in the UK which make their entire business proposition on the basis of very dubious erotica, football matches, and documentaries about the late adult Hitler. So in that sense the Second World War is never far from the British consciousness in that sense. So that wider obsession with World War II, perhaps it should not be surprising, can also be seen in China. Ac oedd y documentor ei wneud o'r ddyn nhw'n allu'r llythgen yn Chino. Dwi'n dechrau i'n teimlo'r hyn mae'n ddyn nhw'n allu'r llythgen, boi'n ddyn nhw'n llythgen i'r ddyn nhw'n llythgen, yn gallu sy'n bwysig o'r rhai'r ddyn nhw, o'r llythgen o'r llythgen yn llythgen yn Lwyd-Wyr 2, o'r Llywodraeth, o'r Tau Victoria o'r Chryfodau ond o'r Paedlau'r Ysgrifenni, London, Middl, wrth gwrs, y red sgwer yn Mosgo, y Cremlynyn Cloc, y third one, y US capital building, a'r ddaf yn ddych chi'n gweld y dda, ychydig yn ei chynllun i'r awdriwn i'r awdriwn, ac mae'n ddweud yn wedi bod yn ddwy'r awdriwn i'r awdriwn i'r awdriwn i'r awdriwn i chi'n gweld. I'm going to take a punt any more, a find out whether or not anyone here has actually seen this item or knows what it is on the right hand side, does it ring any bells? Not too far, but not quite, but it was a good guess. It's actually in a city which has become unexpectedly famous in the last year, the city of Chongqing in southwest China, which of course has become most recently notorious because of the Borsilai political downfall ac ysgandlau'r seidliad cymaint cyflwyno'r newid yn y deall hanes yn y gweithredu yma. Mae'r cynllun, ac yn fwy awdraeth, gweithio'r capital yma o'r Cynig o'r Cyflau Cynig, yn y 1937 ac yn 1945. Ac mae'r cerddysgau yma o'n cerddysgau ceisio'r Cynig yn ddych yn y cyfnod sicrhau wrth iddo i'r sw tatsächlichiad, maen nhw'n rhai un ar un. Mae'r dipynnwys arlawn yn gweithio yma yn gweithio ar gyfer y mae, ac mae'n cwestiynau ymlaen ar gweithiol gyda gyda'u hynny. Rwy'n ei ddweud o sicrhau ond unig ymlaen yma, a rwy'n ei ddweud o'u croeg yn gweithio eu cyfnodol y bwrdd honno am hyn, ac y mhwyaf i gydwynt, dyplimadau a'r cyff ghetto, a'r cyfnod o'r polisiadau. I think is so interesting and so distinctive about the way in which history is being used in China to try and shape contemporary politics. What I'd like to do in the space of the next 25 minutes or so is first to give, if I may, if I will be indulged, a brief history lesson. I hope that not all of it will be familiar to everyone here but a very brief recap on China's history during the Second World War. ac efallai ar y gweithio'r wrth ymlaen, i ddeni'r gweithio i gael gwybod gyda 70-plus iechyd ar y deadlock ar y gwasbwr. Ysgrifennu, ysgrifennu i'r gweithio, a'r gwirio'n grifetio, yn ymgyrch chi'n gweithio'r cyhoeddion yn cyflaen. Mae'r byw ymgyrchu ond i'r gweithio'r gweithio. Felly, mae'n cyflwng o'r gorfodol, yn fawr o fawr o fawr, I should make one particular point clear, for those who have not seen this item in Chongqing, which is an anti-Japanese war memorial as it was called when it was founded, and it still sits there in the centre of the city to this day, it is not in fact twice as tall as the US Capitol building, it's about the height of this rather impressive Georgian ceiling, perhaps a little taller than that. Quite why the box design decided to make it appear so is perhaps more a matter for the field of Freudian psychiatry or psychology rather than history, so I think we will move swiftly on to the next part. Let me give you in perhaps seven or eight minutes, one minute per year of the war, a history of what has long been forgotten, China's very long, very violent, very bloody and very significant involvement in the events of the Second World War. There is I think a very good case to make that World War II didn't start as some Americans would have you believe in 1941 with Pearl Harbor, as some Europeans would have you believe in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, but in 1937 on the outskirts of Beijing with a first clash between Japanese and Chinese troops. The beginning of a sign of Japanese war that would expand into ultimately a conflict across the Eurasian and African continents. And with the outbreak of long simmering tensions between Japanese imperialism and colonialism in China or in East Asia and a rising sense of Chinese nationalism associated let's not forget at that time not so much with the Chinese Communist Party who would eventually come to power under Chairman Mao, but actually with Chiang Kai-shek, a figure whose name is still somewhat familiar, at least to people who have some knowledge of history, but the details of whose career tend either to be forgotten or else dismissed as essentially a historical failure, whose corruption, whose lack of leadership ability and sheer bad policymaking essentially consigned him to the dustbin of history. But in 1937 as China's nationalist leader Chiang was faced by the outbreak of fighting on the outskirts of Beijing, which quickly mushroomed into all out war between the two sides and within the space of a few weeks and months. Essentially the whole of China's eastern seaboard was subject to an invasion and occupation, which would last for the best part of the next eight years until the ending of the global war in 1945. And this essentially led to a splitting up of China in which the then still small but growing Communist Party would control parts of the north of China. The Japanese and their collaborators would control much of the east and the Chinese nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek made the long and arduous trek up the Yangtzee from their capital, formerly at Nanjing, here on the east, all the way upriver 750 miles and more to where are we? Here in the center or the southwestern central part of China to remain there in exile for the next few years. It's worth remembering, or for those who don't know, it's worth knowing and learning quite how astounding the statistics are on what China endured during those eight years of war, the first four of which of course until 1941 China fought essentially alone. There was a little bit of help from the Soviet Union, which is often forgotten. There was also a small amount of financial and unofficial aviation assistance from the United States. But essentially China was left to face the onslaught of many hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops without any significant international partner during the 37 to 41 period, i.e. before Pearl Harbor. Over the course of the eight years of the war, figures, which still need to be further developed as much as we have statistics but reliable and fairly conservative figures, put the number of deaths between 10, 12, 14 million, something along those sorts of lines. Many others of course injured and harmed along the way. Some 80 to 100 million Chinese became refugees during that period, doing grave damage not only to everyday family life, the psychology of people whose stability and home lives, particularly in the more traditional rural parts of China, was suddenly overturned forever, of course creating a golden opportunity for an ultimate communist victory. And also the tentative but very real modernization of industrial infrastructure, roads, railways. In the ten years before World War II broke out in 1937 China had doubled the number of hard metal roads that it had from 20,000 to 40,000 miles, railways increased from 10,000 to 20,000 miles. All of that was destroyed or at least very badly damaged during the years of war. So in terms of China's development and modernization, the war was a personal but also governmental catastrophe. Nonetheless, again as is often forgotten, China did not give in, except of course for the areas under Japanese occupation and where collaborators in some cases reluctantly and other cases more willingly worked with the Japanese. Both the nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and the communists in which Mao Zedong was coming to power continued to fight against the Japanese despite actually very attractive blandishments from Tokyo to change sides and switch over. And it's worth remembering that had they done so, essentially all of East Asia, particularly after 1941, would essentially have come under Japanese control. Nationalist and communist China remained the only parts of East Asia and South East Asia that were not under Japanese control between 1941 and 1945. And that surrender would have made the whole history of the world and certainly of Asia very different in the 20th century and into the 21st. But enough counterfactuals. Let me just give you a few images. Some of the propaganda images, fairly violent I'm afraid, but that was the tenor of the times from cartoonists at the time showing their hatred of the Japanese. And here, the reality of what life meant in that wartime capital, in Chongqing during the war against Japan. I know that your neighbours across the Irish Sea, like occasionally to give Ireland a hard time for being neutral during World War II when of course London was suffering the blitz, ignoring of course large numbers of Irish who fought on the Allied side during the war. What those same Londoners never tend to know was that the most heavily bombed city in the world pretty much during that period was not London, which of course had very heroic defence from the RAF during that period. Many of whom of course were actually Poles at the time. Whereas Chongqing, China's wartime capital, had almost no air defences at all, a few, but not very many. And that meant that this became an everyday scene in Chiang Kai-shek's capital as he struggled to relocate the government 800 miles up the Yangtzee and create a resistant state that will be able to fight the Japanese with huge financial constraints, huge military constraints and huge geographical constraints in the centre of the country. While large swathes of Japanese bombers would come on a regular basis and simply bomb the capital into smithereens day after day, year after year, between 1938 and 1941-42. Other scenes again, scene from above, give an idea of what sort of destruction was waged on the city. And again, the sheer pounding that nationalists generally in particular took during the war has never I think been fully appreciated and therefore taken into account when understanding why that state failed ultimately and the communists were able to bring themselves to power in later years. This document, which is one of many I gathered from the Chongqing municipal archives where many of the wartime records are held, is one example of a much bigger and much more, a very important phenomenon which has immense significance for China today. Let me explain what it is. It's basically a record taken by government inspectors after one of those air raids I mentioned. What it's doing is recording property that had been lost, I think, by a government employee during one of the air raids. For those who can read Chinese, you see a list of items at the top, shoes, quilts, beds, these sorts of things. Then underneath the value of the item that was destroyed, how bad it was destroyed on this document, every single one was just completely obliterated and the value of what was lost. In other words, the first systematic attempts by a Chinese government to regulate, to systematise, to organise the losses made by its people so that governments could offer some sort of compensation. In other words, the emergence of an expectation of a welfare state. I use that word slightly advisedly, obviously a welfare state in China, then and now doesn't necessarily mean quite the same thing that it does in, let's say, the United Kingdom, but on the other hand this is as in Britain, as in the states, as in many of the wartime powers, a moment when the demands made by the war on its citizens in terms of conscription, economics, taxes and so forth also get parlayed into a much greater demand from the citizens towards their state. And once again, if one wants to look at the seeds of the communist revolution, the social revolution happening in nationalist China under the bombs of Qingqing is a very important part of that process. Not least in the present day when anyone who looks at contemporary Chinese affairs will know that I think the number one problem facing China today is not necessarily the battles to come diplomatic or otherwise. In the east or south China sea, but actually the problem of social welfare distribution of pensions of health care of education within China itself and whether or not the party can continue to be legitimate in its rule on the basis of that provision for its people. So again, a very long time ago in terms of time, but certainly in terms of a continuity of thread, I think a very clear link between 1938 and 2013. A couple of images here to try and give an idea of another, I think a normalist situation, which is that nowadays the Chinese war effort, if it's remembered at all in the west tends to be remembered very marginally, mostly in terms of the communist involvement, which in terms of sheer forces was actually much smaller than nationalists, but also bizarre because at the time it was one of the most high profile wars anywhere on the planet. People regarded the Spanish Civil War and the Chinese war against the Japanese as two parts of a progressive fight back against fascist forces. And this is an example of an internationalised rally to support the Chinese earlier in the war. Also another example on that sort of welfareist agenda that I've mentioned of the nationalist government, Chiang Kai-shek's government, trying to come up with work schemes for those refugees I mentioned. I mentioned that something like 80 to 100 million refugees were created in China during the war years. A very large number actually eventually went home when things became a bit calmer, but also very large numbers, certainly tens of millions or more did not go home. They were placed in refugee camps in and around Chongqing or elsewhere and had to find something to do or had to be found something to do during a war which at the time nobody knew was going to last eight years. For all they knew it could end very quickly with a Japanese victory or else it might go on for decades and decades. And therefore the creation of this sort of welfare rehabilitation scheme was an important part of the government's efforts to deal with the refugee crisis, but also upped the ante once again increasing the demand that was being made on the state from its citizens as more was demanded of them. Again the kind of propaganda type activities which were also used to try and create a common sense of purpose against the Japanese. Here we have a torchlight parade of women in the centre of the city. This is not taken in Chongqing which was actually not connected to the railway at that time that came only after the war, but I think in central China soldiers being sent off by railways to the front. The Japanese of course had greatest control of the parts of China where there were railway lines where they could send their troops from Manchuria and Korea down into the mainland. And there an image of total mobilisation and rather like of even the youngest members of society being brought together in the war. So that is a very brief, very thumbnail, far too inadequate view of the war's effects on China and the very broad course of its events. Ultimately of course it ended in August 1945 with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan bringing the war in Asia to a very swift conclusion, but by that time essentially the Chinese state had been turned upside down. The nationalists at their very last edges of strength and state capacity they had been worn down by eight years of war, rampant corruption, inflation, the whole variety of other problems really eating away at their legitimacy whereas the communists who had actually done much less of the fighting it has to be said, but still resisting through guerrilla tactics against the Japanese had increased their legitimacy. I'm now going to fast forward about 60 to 70 years at great speed, but to do that I have to give at least a little bit of a bridge. So let's just take yet another oddity, a paradox perhaps. This utterly transformative event, eight years of total warfare that changed the nature of China, was almost undiscussed during the Cold War, whether in China or in the West. Why? Well in the West I think the answers are in some ways quite simple. In five years between 1945 and 1950 Japan and China changed sides in the Western imagination. In 1945 Japan was the demonic enemy that had to be defeated, China was more or less our ally. By 1950 Japan was safely in the American embrace, it was demilitarized and was making its way to becoming an economic superpower and a diplomatic pygmy as it is perhaps relatively speaking today. Apologies to any Japanese in the audience. Whereas of course China had become a sullen communist giant whose intentions were entirely unclear and which didn't even have diplomatic relations with the United States anymore. For all those reasons it became unfeasible to think about the Chinese wartime contribution in any kind of nuanced way. The nationalists had been discredited and anyway were a rump state off on Taiwan where Chiang Kai-shek from the American point of view was causing all sorts of trouble. And the communists of course there was no mileage in talking about the communist contribution to winning the war unless you wanted Senator Joe McCarthy to call you up and haul you in front of Congress. So clearly no mileage in that direction. But why wouldn't the Chinese celebrate as every other allied power, the Americans, the British, the French. The French celebrated winning the war even though that was in the views of many a somewhat partial view of the French contribution to victory in 1945. Although not if you talk to General de Gaulle of course. And yet China which of course had made huge and genuine sacrifices and had been a very active ally was almost forgotten. And of course the reason was simple again. After the communist victory in 1949 one of the things that Chairman Mao would not countenance under any circumstances was a description of the nationalist war effort as anything but hollow, rotten, corrupt. A narrative in other words where the Chinese Communist Party had helped defeat the Japanese and the nationalists had made no contribution whatsoever. And that held very broadly speaking all the way up till the 1970s, even early 1980s when yet again there was a huge sea change. Suddenly people started to notice in museums, in films, in television programs, in books, in the Chinese mainland people were saying nice things about Chiang Kai-shek, about the nationalists, about the war time effort. Why? Well once again present day politics of the period had affected the way in which history was being read. Chiang and Mao were both dead so the personal element of that duel across the Taiwan states had gone. Japan had now re-established normal diplomatic relations with China after 1972. Up to that point the Chinese leadership had thought that it was not a good idea to harp on Chinese war crimes because it would not help to detach Japan from the American embrace. But that changed after 72. And also and most seriously the Cultural Revolution had delegitimised the Maoist project. China, as I'm sure you all know, had been turned upside down inside out by a war against itself during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, early 1970s. And with the Nixon opening up to America and with the Deng Xiaoping leadership which was going to take a more pragmatic view of China's role, the time was ripe also to open up to Taiwan and try and reunify. And clearly being a little bit nicer about the nationalist war effort might be a way to woo the elites on Taiwan itself. So an official position was taken and we do know as Tony Brooks who is about to get his PhD at Cambridge has written some very interesting work on the inside Chinese communist elite politics of reversing the historical position. Huqiao Mu, one of the top Chinese leaderships as Tony Brooks shows, was instrumental in making this change. But the effects as so often with political reform in China were very, very unpredictable from the point of view of the leadership. Because they enabled new stories to be told, stories which were politically useful but also in some cases had to do with building new types of social capital. And also in some cases, interestingly, different types of economic capital as well. Let me bring us to the final phase by showing you a couple of examples of what I mean. Here is a book which I bought again down in the southwest of China, not actually in Chongqing but in Chengdu, another city of the region, a capital of Sichuan province. It's called in Chinese One Man's War of Resistance Against Japan. I actually bought it because I thought it was a memoir. It's not a memoir, it's something rather more interesting. It's a catalogue by a private collector of nationalist army memorabilia from World War II in China. And the message that is written in the text that accompanies this is that it's time for us the Chinese but also us the Sichuanese who of course were the province at the heart of the wartime resistance in western China to recall and to celebrate our contribution to the resistance against Japan. The unstated but very clear implication being and that resistance had absolutely nothing to do with the Chinese Communist Party but we should talk about it anyway. This has got Mr Fan, the gentleman, wrote the book into a certain amount of hot water with the local communist authorities who basically allowed him to carry on displaying these items in a private museum he owns as long as he built a parallel museum to the Chinese Communist contribution as well, so I guess there's a sort of compromise of sorts. This book, going to the inland part of China, going to the interior, is about evacuee journeys. Again, anyone who grew up in post war Britain will know that children's stories about being evacuated to the countryside away from the Blitz in London are a staple of fiction as well as memoir. But in China, for 40, 50 years after those evacuations in the 30s and 40s, nobody could talk about it because they weren't being evacuated to Yan An, the communist capital. They were being evacuated to Chongqing, the nationalist capital, and for half a century that was taboo but no longer. So books like this, very late in the day many of the people giving their memories are in their 80s or even even older so there's not much time left but they are popular and very visible. Another example here of a new localism. This book is not called The Great War of Resistance against Japan of the Chinese people but of the Sichuan people. In other words of that one province at the heart of the resistance which provided conscripts, grain, tax income, revenue, all of the things that the state needed to keep going in the war. And finally they get a statue of their own unknown soldier and celebrate their local contribution to a national story. And a way for local politicians in China to not exactly go 180 degrees but certainly 90 degrees from the Beijing agenda without doing anything other than obeying an official patriotic call to talk about China's glorious resistance. And this brings us back at the end to where we started but I hope with a bit more context because that television programme that I mentioned is not a one off. It is part of a wider agenda and this programme which I didn't point out at the beginning will point out now was made not by the central Chinese television station in Beijing CCTV but by CQTV Chongqing local television in the south west. And I think it has two messages and those messages tell us a lot about the complex and multi layered nature of identity politics in China today. Because Chongqing by recalling its history as China's wartime capital is sending messages to I was about to say to two people to three sets of people. One is people in Chongqing itself saying look this was your history and it's time to remember it. That's perhaps the simplest thing. The second audience is an international one. It is to people sitting here and in London and in Washington and Moscow and all the places symbolised by those buildings saying there were not three major water arm allies. There were four. There was a time not that long ago when China was an international co-operative actor on the side of righteousness against the forces of darkness and you would do well to remember that when you assess Chinese behaviour in the present day. Now whether that's a fair analogy is for us to debate after I finished speaking but it is certainly analogy which programmes and propaganda like this is supposed to push forward. But the final and I think perhaps most complex but most interesting argument that's being put forward by this sort of cultural product is to other Chinese who are not from Chongqing. It is a reminder to people in Beijing in Shanghai to Shanghai to wherever else it might be in the country that this long forgotten almost despised former heartland of the nationalist party did have an important and very patriotic national role way back in the 30s and 40s. Chongqing is important today. It's the biggest metropolis in China. It's a huge trade centre. Despite the downfall of Borsi Lai it still has a major political role. Being made head of Chongqing is a major step up these days to top leadership if you don't have to get caught up in a murder case along the way. But in the 1930s and 40s they remind us it really was some place for a brief shining moment it was a world capital and it also has lessons from that period to tell the rest of China today. So to that extent it's the Chongqing authorities reminding the rest of China that they are not people to be trifled with in that sense. I think that that series of interlocking debates about identity which linked to debates about social welfare, about international identity and about China's changing and very unpredictable place both at home, in the region and internationally are drawing inexorably on a very long and complex series of historical memories some of which have only come to light very recently and I think will continue to do so certainly for years and possibly even for decades to come. So I'll leave it there and we'll go to questions I think. Thank you very much.