China Mines its Pre-Communist Past

Perhaps the fastest-moving place in one of the world's fastest-moving countries is Chongqing, in China's south-west. The most populous city in China (some 30 million inhabitants), it's at the head of the Three Gorges Dam, one of the country's most important infrastructure projects. The city is not beautiful, but it has a real energy and sense of place, sitting on cliffs above the confluence of two major rivers, the Yangtze and the Jialing. One of the most impressive, if hair-raising, rides in China is the five-minute cable car journey across the river, with only some slightly creaky-looking engineering preventing you from dropping into the fast-flowing waters below. The whole city is lit by an endless array of neon lights as its inhabitants continue to fuel the country's economic boom.

But Chongqing was not always so prosperous. Just over 60 long years ago, during World War II, Chongqing, then known better as Chungking, was connected to India by the perilous air route across the Burma 'hump', an essential lifeline for the city in its defence against the Japanese occupation of eastern China. That history, now largely forgotten, has become part of a wider Chinese quest for national and global status today, and Chongqing is a key meeting point for questions that link China's past, present and future.

For seven years, from 1938 to 1945, Chongqing was the temporary capital of China, whose Nationalist (Kuomintang) government, under Chiang Kai-shek, held out in resistance against the Japanese invasion. That history was quickly blanked out in Chairman Mao's China, after the communist victory in 1949. Mao's party did not wish its official histories to tell any story which might reflect credit on their old enemy, Chiang Kai-shek, who had now fled to Taiwan, and the Communist Party's interpretation of the events of the war against Japan played down the importance of the Nationalist regime's continued resistance, without which the Allies might never have won in Asia.