Wednesday, October 21, 2026
5:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. EDT
Location: Mortara Center Building Conference Room
October 21, 2026
China’s Date Debate: How Manchurian Scholars Rewrote World War II
A Book Talk with Emily Matson
Event Series: Other Initiative Events
In early 2017, China’s Ministry of Education announced that secondary school history textbooks were required to change the timeline associated with the War of Resistance against Japan (China’s World War II) from eight to fourteen years, pushing the starting date from the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident back to the 1931 Mukden Incident. More than simply a top-down decision from Beijing, however, the 2017 decision was also influenced by decades of Manchurian scholarship. In her book China’s Date Debate (2026), Dr. Emily Matson recenters these scholars and their participation in the subsequent “date debate” amongst Chinese historians over the proper starting date for China’s World War II. Furthermore, she argues that the Chinese Communist Party was ultimately motivated to adopt the 14-year war timeline to bolster the Party’s legitimizing narrative both domestically and internationally.
The discussion will be moderated by Georgetown associate professor Denise Ho.
This event is co-sponsored by Georgetown University’s Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues and the Asian Studies Program at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.
Featuring
Emily Matson is an adjunct professor in Georgetown University’s Department of History and received her Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from the University of Virginia. She spent several years living in Beijing and Shanghai, where she studied Mandarin Chinese and conducted fieldwork for her dissertation. Dr. Matson’s research interests include Manchuria, World War II, nationalism, and Sino-Japanese relations, and she was recently a fellow with the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations. Her first book, China’s Date Debate: How Manchurian Scholars Rewrote World War II, was just published with the University of Michigan’s China Understandings Today series.
Denise Y. Ho is associate professor in the Asian Studies Program at Georgetown University. She is the author of Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China, and is currently completing a book entitled The Nation’s Gate: A Cross-Border History of Hong Kong and China.