The Athenaeum invited Rana Mitter. Beijing’s policies continue to dominate the news in the Asia-Pacific region. Will China and Japan clash in the seas of East Asia? Will China be able to implement social welfare policies to calm dissent and social unrest? Why did it take so long for China to become a major power? One unexpected but crucial story that helps illuminate these different questions is the wrenching history of China’s experience during World War II, in the epic war against Japan from 1937 to 1945, when over 14 million Chinese died and some 80 million became refugees. Rana Mitter, professor of history and politics of modern China at Oxford University, will outline how and why the battered China of wartime became today’s superpower-in-the-making and explore the impact of the memory of that war to effectuate domestic and international politics in present day China.

Rana Mitter is director of the University China Centre at the University of Oxford, where he is a professor of the history and politics of modern China.

He is the author of several books, including the award-winning “A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World” (Oxford, 2004). His most recent book “Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II” was named as a 2013 Book of the Year in the Financial Times and the Economist, won the 2014 Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was a finalist for the Bernard Schwartz prize of the Asia Society of New York.

In the UK he is a regular presenter of the arts and ideas program Free Thinking on BBC Radio 3. He comments regularly on contemporary Chinese politics and society in media around the world and has spoken at forums including the World Economic Forum at Davos. His reviews and essays have appeared in newspapers including the Financial Times, International New York Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Caijing, and South China Morning Post. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2015.