I gather the Japanese and Taiwanese get on pretty well
Recently the PRC was very annoyed by some revisionist textbooks that glossed over disgraceful Japanese behaviour in China
As others have pointed out, money makes a major difference.
There is always the possibility that individuals are Ok, and animosity is just the ‘official line’
Taiwan was a Japanese colony from 1895 to 1945. Japan built a significant part of the Taiwanese infrastructure. The elder Taiwanese generally speaking think very highly of the Japanese, and identify their culture as a mix of Taiwanese and Japanese. Most were educated in Japanese, speak Japanese quite fluently, and usually had Japanese names.
However, do not confuse the older Taiwanese generation with the Chinese mainlanders that came over in 1949. The Chinese mainlanders of that generation generally hate the Japanese. People below the age of 60 are quite mixed, but the native Taiwanese usually have a pretty strong and positive affiliation with Japanese culture and people.
So, Taiwan is a bit schizophrenic with regards to the Japanese, and largely determined by one’s cultural ethnicity.
Yes, I probably do and will check it out next chance I get. BTW, after searching for a few hours, this was the only scholarly link I could find about the book. You might want to read this. It is from my old alma mater, The University of California, and their first pass at collaborating the source material highlights a lot of conclusions that are suspect. I have neither read the book (but have read the entire website), nor can vouchsafe the Professors/graduate students involved in the website. Regarding the partitioning of China, they debunk the premise that Mao and Stalin wanted to partition China. It does not state that Mao cooperated with the Japanese against the Nationalists.
As the website says better than I: “we are generally critical and skeptical of many of Chang and Halliday’s claims in their critical portrait of Mao, we recognize that some may portray our project as a defense of Mao and his revolution. Let me assure you that that is not our purpose. The terror and brutality of Mao’s revolution are beyond dispute. The suffering of the Chinese people was enormous. But we are convinced that as historians and scholars, we will best understand Mao and the Chinese revolution by an honest and accurate adherence to established historical methodologies. Our aim is not to defend Mao, but to defend the search for truth about modern China – a truth that may never be fully knowable given the nature of the sources, but a truth that must be sought with all means at our disposal.”
Yeah, I’ve read a lot of online reviews of the book, and a number claim that some of the sources and especially the citing of the same is not what it might be. But there’s a lot of meat in the book - none more so than in discussions of the Mao/Japanese theme. And how many odinary people know that more people may have died of starvation in Mao’s blockade of his own people at Changchun than in the Japanese massacres at Nanjing? (Figures range between the official CCP figure of 120,000 (mind-boggling in itself) to 330,000.)
Of course, I was attempting an apophthegm when I wrote baldly on record “Well, Mao cooperated with the Japanese against the Nationalists”. The avid reader of my stuff might have picked that up, though the use of “well” was meant as a bit of a clue to those unfamiliar with my style. The reply got any power it might claim to possess by picking up on the word cooperate in the OP, in “In what areas of science, economics, etc. do they cooperate, if anywhere?” For “cooperaed”, read “reached a largely unspoken understanding based on the old principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
Well, most orginary people DO know that the death toll at Nanking has never been seriously claimed at any less than 200,000, and that’s under a policy of deliberate mass murder, often in the most brutal fashion, and most people also know that death by famine was a common occurance during this period in China regardless of which warring faction happened to be in control, and that the Nationalists generally treated their subject populations with much greater brutality than the communists (that’s why they lost) and were equaly complicit in the deaths at Changchun. After all, if they were so concerned about civlian casualties they could have simply surrendered the city, or broken out, couldn’t they?
So I’m going to forgive the ordinary people for being less than outraged at your revelation.
KTB, are you ethnic Chinese? I’m British, ethnically part-Celtic and part-Norman, predominantly.
Yup. Which part of the UK are you from? I spent a good part of my life in London.
Terrible place, only god knows why anyone would want to live there. 
I’ll take Chinese atrocities for 80 points Bob, just one counter point example:
In 1938 during the war against Japanese aggression, instead of going out to fight the Japanese forces, the Chiang Kai-shek troops blew up the dyke along the Yellow River at Hua-yuankou near the city of Chengchow in Honan province to cover their treat. This resulted in flooding 54,000 square kilometers of land in three provinces, bringing disaster to 12,500,000 people, 890,000 of whom died in the flood.
I guess I am going to have to get the Mao: the Untold Story so I can discuss it depth. That said, the few scholars of China reviews I’ve seen on line take that the work, “cites” and especially the conclusions with an enormous grain of salt. Here’s an interesting link that does a good job of highlighting many of the issues that I have with Wild Swans.
@China Guy
Thanks for that link on Taiwan 1895-1945
We in the UK are appallingly ill informed of other people’s history.
I got the Taiwan-Japan, post 1945 stuff from a Hong Kong Chinese guy, and am surprized that there is so much more to the story.
It sounds as if the Japanese were quite enlightened, by the standards of the time.
Ironically, it looks as if the PRC is currently busily ‘Colonializing’ itself, probably using similar principles - a diverse but homogeneously educated elite industrializing peasants.
It makes one wonder what would have happened it the USA had not shut off oil supplies to Japan in 1941.
Wild Swans is self-promotional dreck. The best book on the horrible sufferings Chinese people endured during the Cultural Revolution is Lien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai. Mao: the Unknown Story is in a different category altogether; perhaps more Holliday and less Chang.
A couple of randomistic data points:
Several of my Japanese clients have reported bemusedly on the “unberievable” (yes, that is really how they put it) hostility of the people they met in Shanghai, and specifically, the anger of Chinese-sports-team supporters when they attended soccer or baseball games between Japan and China. When I very obliquely suggested that there were times in the past when Japan had been equally “rude” to China, they clammed up and I began to fear I’d lost my job for offending them. They STILL do not deal well with discussion of wartime stuff, and at best can manage some sort of “Mistakes were made on both sides” faux-apologetic discussion of “The Second World War” (as they disinterestedly call it) – all IME.
My ex-GF (parents both Taiwan-born) HATED all Japanese. But yes, her family was 1949-era refugees from the Mainland, and Catholic to boot, so probably faced extra persecution from both Chi-Communists and Japanese. I was not aware that pre-1949 Taiwanese were (per the earlier post) more cosmopollitan, as it were.
Maybe I didn’t make it so clear in the earlier post. But the Japanese colony pre-1949 Taiwanese generally liked the Japanese. This is in marked contrast with the Koreans, who were colonized at roughly the same time. Also the Manchurians weren’t real hot on the Japanese, but they were colonized later in the 1930’s.
Lee Teng-hui, the first democratly elected President of Taiwan identified himself very strongly with his Japanese cultural/language/educational roots. In fact, he spoke Taiwanese as his native language and Japanese as a close second, also his English was better than his spoken Mandarin. IIRC, he had been educated in japan and rapatriated back to Taiwan after WW2 ended.
My Japanese customers here in China, executives for some of the biggest Japanese multinationals like Sony and Toyota, have never had an experience bad enough to relate to me. I’ve asked and they’re fine. Even during last years protests and stoning of the Japanese embassy.