Rescuing Heritage from Humiliation: The Navalist Reinterpretation of the Sino-French and Sino-Japanese Wars

In the late-nineteenth century, U.S. “navalist” historians reinterpreted defeat in the War of 1812 as an argument for an ocean-going battlefleet. Something similar is underway in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as historians and propogandists reimagine the Qing Dynasty’s defeats in the Sino-French (1883–1885) and Sino-Japanese Wars (1894–1895) as sources of naval heritage. Discarding Mao-era orthodoxies, the navalist reinterpretation rescues an origin story for Chinese sea power from the “century of national humiliation.” As in the nineteenth-century United States, historical example and myth stress China’s identity as a maritime state and contextualize the ongoing modernization of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). By highlighting these parallel revisionist efforts, this article draws attention to the instrumentalization of historical memory in the service of navalism as well as the comparative history of the United States and China: two continental empires that justified battlefleet navies.