[Academic Achievement] The Chinese Communist Party's War of Resistance in Foreign Archival Documents Published

News Network (Correspondent: Xiong Xiaoyu) On August 31, the symposium on the new book The Chinese Communist Party's War of Resistance in Foreign Archival Documents was held in Beijing. The book was edited by Professor Hu Dekun, Senior Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Wuhan University, with Professor Peng Dunwen as deputy editor, and published by People’s Publishing House. Vice President Lu Wei of Wuhan University attended the symposium. The publication of this volume reflects Wuhan University’s commitment to organized research and interdisciplinary collaboration, making significant contributions to the academic discourse for constructing a self-reliant knowledge system with distinctive Chinese characteristics.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War, making the publication particularly timely. This book is a flagship outcome of the major rolling project on WWII history under the National Social Science Fund's War of Resistance History Research Initiative, led by Professor Hu Dekun. The project took eight years from initiation to publication, resulting in a work of approximately 490,000 characters. It involved the collection and collation of archival materials from multiple countries and in multiple languages, and the collaborative research of scholars in world history, Chinese history, and Party history. This work meticulously examines and utilizes recently declassified World War II archival documents from Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia. By integrating multi-source historical materials, it comprehensively presents wartime evaluations of the Chinese Communist Party’s resistance efforts by foreign observers and intelligence agencies, as well as their understanding of the Sinicization of Marxism. The book documents the outstanding achievements of the CCP during the war, reflects its international impact, and fully demonstrates that the Chinese Communist Party served as the mainstay of China’s War of Resistance.

Experts and scholars at the symposium engaged in in-depth discussion of the book, highly praising its academic value and practical significance. They noted that as an interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and innovative historical study, the work fills a gap in domestic and international research on the global influence of the CPC’s War of Resistance. It thus makes an important contribution to objectively and comprehensively representing China’s resistance experience.

The symposium was hosted by Wuhan University, with participation from the Institute of Party History and Literature of the CPC Central Committee, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Academy of Military Sciences of the People’s Liberation Army, the China Society for the History of the Second World War, the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, Peking University, Nankai University, the University of International Relations, and more than ten other research institutions and universities. Over 30 representatives from People’s Publishing House and major media outlets including Xinhua News Agency, People’s Daily, Guangming Daily, China Education Daily, and Chinese Social Sciences Today also attended.

(Images provided by the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. Editor: Zhao Jifan)