China’s Date Debate is an in-depth investigation of the Chinese Communist Party’s remapping of China’s World War II timeline from eight years (1937-–1945) to fourteen years (1931–1945). Instead of the previously accepted starting date of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937, the Chinese Communist Party defined the war’s starting date as the Mukden Incident on September 18, 1931, which triggered the Japanese Kwantung Army’s invasion of Manchuria. Since the 1980s, scholars from Manchuria have demanded a fourteen-year war timeline to encompass the invasion of their homeland. By the 1990s, other scholars took notice and started to counter with claims that the eight-year timeline was the more accurate. Subsequently, a fierce “date debate” emerged between the two sides that was only resolved by the 2017 proclamation from the Ministry of Education. 

Emily Matson demonstrates that the decision to set China's World War II timeline at fourteen years was not merely a top-down decision, but was influenced by decades of Manchurian scholarship on the war. China’s Date Debate recenters Manchuria as a region of critical importance for China’s national identity today and the implications of this “date debate” on the Chinese Communist Party’s domestic legitimacy and international image.

Emily Matson is Professional Lecturer in the Elliot School of International Affairs at the George Washington University and Adjunct Professor of History at Georgetown University.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: History and Historiography of China’s WWII in the PRC
Chapter 2: The “Date Debate”
Chapter 3: Mao and Marxist Dialectics 
Chapter 4: Manchuria as a “Cradle of Conflict”
Chapter 5: Implications for Domestic and International Legitimacy
Chapter 6: World War II in Global Historical Memory
Conclusion
Bibliography