History as a Weapon of Cognitive Warfare: Japan Faces New Obstacles to Reconciliation with China

Brief History of the History Wars

In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi issued a public statement expressing regret for Japan’s past aggression toward other countries in Asia. Prime Ministers Koizumi Jun’ichirō, in 2005, and Abe Shinzō, in 2015, marked the sixtieth and seventieth anniversaries with statements of their own. Each of these documents is a product of its own time, representing a distinct phase in the long-running history wars that have strained Japan’s relations with both China and South Korea.

In the 1990s, public support for historical reconciliation was running high in Japan but much less so in South Korea, where democratization had removed constraints on the discussion of injuries and injustices suffered at the hands of Imperial Japan. In China, around the same time, the Chinese Communist Party’s fight against Japanese aggression had emerged as a key theme of the CCP’s campaign to reaffirm the legitimacy of its absolute rule.

The 2005 statement issued by Prime Minister Koizumi came at a time when the history wars had erupted anew, provoking fierce anti-Japanese protests in China. In 2015, President Xi Jinping was working hard to position China—then the world’s second-largest economy—as a leading member of mainstream international society, in part by stressing its historical role in the construction of the postwar world as one of the Big Four allies in the “war against fascism” (alongside Russia, with whom Beijing was cultivating closer ties).

Now, 10 years later, the history wars have entered a new phase. As the world marks the eightieth anniversary of the war’s end, Japan’s controversial past will be under renewed scrutiny. To respond appropriately, we must understand the nature of today’s dispute and the factors shaping it. In the following, we will explore and analyze the background, context, and distinguishing features of today’s history wars.

History as a Tool of Legitimization

Since the beginning of the modern era, states have written their own versions of history and disseminated those stories via the schools and other avenues of education to unite their people under the collective illusion of “nationhood.” This trend is still apparent, particularly among younger states, such as the People’s Republic of China. The national histories China has written over the past few decades are carefully crafted to promote social cohesion and bolster the legitimacy of the CCP.

The historical narratives relayed through school education and state propaganda are not the same as the results of rigorous scholarly research. However, when state power is particularly strong—for example, under a national wartime mobilization or under a strong authoritarian government like present-day China’s—regimes have a tendency to co-opt historical research for their own political ends. President Xi Jinping has exerted tight control over the output of China’s historians to impose ideological conformity, citing threats to regime security from hostile forces inside and outside of China. To this end, the Xi regime has consolidated the various historical research departments within the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and stepped up criticism of “historical nihilism” (as it calls historiography that diverges from the approved party-centered account), targeting certain researchers with a high reputation for rigorous scholarship.

The state-controlled historical narratives disseminated through school education and propaganda tend to change in response to shifts in government policy. In Deng Xiaoping’s China, historians were encouraged to explore such topics as modern economic development and the Republic of China in the early twentieth century. By contrast, Xi Jinping has promoted a rewriting of modern history centered on the CCP, a campaign reflecting his emphasis on the party’s comprehensive and supreme leadership, eclipsing the role of government.

Under Xi Jinping, the Second Sino-Japanese War has assumed an even more prominent place in history textbooks than previously, with the start of the conflict pushed back from 1937 to 1931. At the same time, the new textbooks downplay the Second United Front, which temporarily suspended the Chinese Civil War as the CCP joined with the ruling Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) to resist the Japanese invasion. This change in emphasis reflects a shift in China’s Taiwan policy beginning around 2016, when Beijing abandoned the idea of reunification via a Third United Front—that is, a new alliance between the Communist government and Taiwan’s Kuomintang.

Participatory Culture and Fragmentation

Efforts by state governments to shape the national narrative to their own advantage go back to the beginning of the modern age. But today’s historical debates are further complicated by two factors that have come into play much more recently: the newly prominent role of lay people as writers of history and the fragmentation of the public’s historical understanding.

The first factor can be attributed to the rise of the internet and of social media in particular, which has opened up historiography to the point where the “influencers” now outnumber professional historians with academic degrees. Of course, there have always been local historians and storytellers outside of the academic mainstream, but their influence was circumscribed. The proliferation of amateur historians with the ability to influence large numbers of information consumers is a dramatic new development.

One should note that many of these history influencers back up their theories with historical evidence, or at least what passes for evidence. This is possible because so many historical source materials are now easily accessible online. From a professional historian’s viewpoint, the problem is the tendency to skip over such crucial steps as source criticism (analysis to assess the context and reliability of source material) and the objective review of previous studies. But for many of today’s information consumers, the citation of historical source materials lends an air of credibility to the alternative accounts circulated via social media. This trend has led to a devaluation of professional expertise, further complicating historical discourse.

The second factor, fragmentation of historical perceptions, is closely intertwined with the broader phenomenon of social fragmentation. Growing economic inequality, a consequence of globalization, has exacerbated social fragmentation in recent decades, and this is reflected in people’s diverging views of history. In the United States, social justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter, have been paralleled by challenges to the established narrative of American history and its pantheon of “heroes.” In other cases, however, underprivileged groups may embrace a more nationalistic version of their country’s history. There are also countries and regions—Taiwan is an example—where divisions by ethnicity and generation have given rise to a variety of historical viewpoints.

To compound the confusion, we live in an era in which the logical choices of rational individuals matter less than the emotional responses elicited and amplified by today’s media. Domestic and international politics are areas in which emotions tend to run particularly high, and those emotions inevitably shape people’s understanding of history. This is another important background factor affecting the history wars in the 2020s.

Contesting the Western Version

Let us turn now to the international discursive space. Globally, historical discourse has long been dominated by the militarily and industrially advanced powers. Western colonial powers wrote their own histories of the countries they colonized, and those accounts, written from a modern Western perspective, often replaced the colonized countries’ traditional narratives. When the colonies later gained independence, they found it hard to overcome the influence of the colonizers’ versions and recover their own histories.

Furthermore, historical research in the field of international politics and diplomacy depends to a large degree on access to diplomatic documents. Since developed countries such as Britain and the United States led the way in recording and publishing such documents, accounts of international affairs tended to reflect their perspective rather than the viewpoints of developing countries, which lacked the capacity to publish their own diplomatic records.

However, this situation has begun to change over the past two decades, as the developed world’s relative influence has waned. Rising Asian and African countries have built their own archives of historical materials and begun using scholarly methods to craft compelling accounts of their own history, including international affairs and diplomacy. Of course, such accounts are by no means free of political bias, particularly nationalistic sentiment. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that a major reframing of world history has gotten underway thanks to the great strides Asian and African countries have made in historical research.

China’s Evolving Narrative

With this as background, let us consider how China—a major regional power and aspiring global leader ruled by an authoritarian government—is attempting to rewrite history.

As mentioned above, Xi Jinping has placed particular emphasis on history as part of his domestic drive to impose ideological unity and further strengthen the dictatorship of the Communist Party. To this end, the approved history of the party has assumed a prominent place (dwarfing the history of the Chinese state) in school and non-school education, and historians who take issue with that narrative have been condemned as “nihilists.” At the university level, the curriculum of the “Outline of Modern Chinese History,” a required course for all undergraduate students, has been revised to place the CCP more firmly at its core.

Externally as well, the Xi regime has been collaborating with countries like Russia and Belarus to promote a “correct view” of World War II. This year, we can expect a fresh burst of activity on this front, with a focus on Victory Day (May 9) in Russia and Victory over Japan Day (September 3) in China.

History as a Weapon of Cognitive Warfare

A particularly significant trend in this context is the integration of China’s internal and external messaging regarding modern history. In 2015, when China marked the seventieth anniversary of the war’s end, Beijing’s external messaging focused on China’s historical status as one of the Big Four allies in the war against fascism and its key role—comparable to that of the United States and Britain—in building the postwar world. In this way, Beijing strove to position itself as one of the poles in an increasingly multipolar world order.

In 2025, China’s views on history are being broadcast to people inside and outside of China, through social media and a variety of other means, as one front in an integrated, multipronged cognitive war encompassing many policy domains.

One aspect of this war that bears careful scrutiny is an effort—thus far largely confined to China—to undercut the legitimacy of the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco, which re-established peaceful relations between Japan and the Allied Powers. In recent years a group of Chinese “scholars” have been making the case that the treaty is invalid, thus casting doubt not only on Japan’s position in the postwar world but also on the legal status of Taiwan, Okinawa, and the Korean Peninsula.

Calling the treaty the product of a plot by the United States in violation of the January 1942 Declaration by United Nations, these revisionists deny the legitimacy of the instrument that forms the basis for the US-centered hub-and-spokes security architecture that prevails in East Asia today. According to this version of history, Okinawa’s territorial status is up for grabs, and Taiwan should be returned to China in accordance with the 1943 Cairo Declaration. It is a historical narrative that supports China’s political goals of reuniting Taiwan with the mainland and eroding US leadership, and it is being propagated by the government and the CCP as a weapon of cognitive warfare aimed at altering the global status quo. As the eightieth anniversary draws public attention to the end and aftermath of World War II, there is a high probability that China will widen the target of this propaganda to the surrounding region and beyond.

In Japan as well, we can expect to hear a wide range of opinions on World War II and the history wars as the eightieth anniversary approaches. What we need to keep in mind is that today there are new dimensions to this long-running historical dispute, and that China’s messaging on the subject is now an integral part of a much broader cognitive warfare campaign designed to shape public opinion at home and around the world.

(Banner photo: President Xi Jinping of China chats with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the sixteenth BRICS summit, held in Kazan, Russia, in October 2024. © Sputnik/Kyōdō. According to Russian media, Xi will also attend the eightieth Victory Day celebrations in Moscow on May 9.)