Theories of the Just War in Modern China – From the Anti-Japanese War to the Anti-American Wars –

Since the People's Republic of China entered the Korean War in October 1950, PRC’s war in Korea has been called a “Just War”. Academia has explained the just war theory only based on the theory of righteous war in the Chinese classics, and few studies investigate the historical formation of the PRC’s just war theory. This paper demonstrated that China's perception to see the Korean War as a just war was formed by the Kuomintang and the Communist Party in the course of the anti-Japanese war since the Manchurian Incident in 1931 based on different logical grounds. The Kuomintang accepted the theory of international justice since World War I, which sought to resolve international disputes according to international law and in 1937-38 called the anti-Japanese war a just war. The Communist Party, under the instructions of the Comintern, in 1933-35 called the national revolutionary war a just war based on the revolutionary theory of justice led by the proletariat, which was derived from Lenin's Socialism and War(1915). Despite these differences, both parties raised and spread the theory of just war widely in order to appeal China's justice in resisting Japanese imperialism's invasion at home and abroad. The Chinese Communist Party's just war theory was applied not only to the anti-Japanese war but also to anti-imperialist wars, including the subsequent anti-American wars(in Korea, Vietnam, etc.). It was a theory of war shared by the communist parties of various countries, including North Korea and the Soviet Union. Since the Korean War, the just war theory has been applied to the perception and narratives of the imperial China’s wars against foreign powers based on the Marxist historiography and was historicized as such.N