While the United States Air Force systematically bombed the majority of urban Japan during the final months of World War II, the city of Kyoto remained nearly untouched, offering an almost pristine nuclear target. Yet Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the central figure behind the sparing of the city, struck Kyoto from the list of nuclear targets. Stimson’s efforts to preserve Kyoto have received only passing attention from postwar scholars. A review of relevant postwar historiography, however, reveals three frameworks that provide explanations for the sparing of the city: moralist, orthodox, and revisionist. The moralist approach views Stimson’s decision to preserve Kyoto as an effort to live up to the principles of an earlier era. Orthodox scholars suggest Stimson’s decision was driven by a desire to save lives and end the war quickly. Revisionists, by contrast, argue that Stimson’s calculus was shaped by concern over the growing specter of a standoff with the Soviet Union. The imprecise and at times contradictory explanations furnished thus far fail to provide a convincing interpretation of Kyoto’s role in the final years of the war. To understand Stimson’s adamancy requires examining references to the city in his diary and placing them into broader context to gain a sense of how the city related to the strategic objectives and challenges facing the secretary of war.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Chinese communist trade officials used commercial marketing not just to spur trade with foreign capitalists, but also to redefine China’s national identity in the eyes of companies, consumers, and governments outside the socialist bloc. Chinese officials sought to unmake the perception of China as a backward, ‘semi-colonial’ state and to write a narrative of China as a modern, postcolonial member of the postwar international commercial order. This article examines two persistent themes that emerged within ‘new’ China’s commercial narrative of itself. First, Chinese officials developed a story of solidarity with decolonizing states based on the theme of shared oppression at the hands of imperialist aggressors. Second, Chinese officials used commercial marketing to call for open and inclusive trade, regardless of differences in domestic political systems or ideology. By doing so, these officials wrested ‘free trade’ for China’s own use as a cudgel for attacking U.S. sanctions and as a device for framing ‘new’ China as a champion of trade rights for postcolonial states. Both themes reveal how China sought to redefine its image in the eyes of diverse audiences outside the socialist bloc through international commerce.
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