April 12, 2026

Through Junko Miyawaki’s preface, this essay discusses the opacity of contemporary China, the difficulty of writing the history of the Chinese Communist Party, the falsity of Chinese statistics and historical materials, and the resolve that the Japanese people must possess when great upheaval eventually occurs in China.
It is an extraordinarily thought-provoking essay that confronts the present condition of China and asks how Japan as a whole should prepare for the coming crisis.

June 16, 2019
When considering China’s future, I do not believe that things can possibly continue safely as they are.
I want every Japanese person to consider in advance what kind of resolve the Japanese people should have in confronting a great upheaval in China.

However, because contemporary China is a troublesome and incomprehensible entity, I had no intention of venturing into it.
This was a chapter published on December 10, 2018 under that title.
I believe it was Masayuki Takayama who introduced me to the existence of Junko Miyawaki.
The alumni of Ise High School, Kyoto University, and the Osaka University Graduate School must surely take great pride in the fact that the scholarship of Junko Miyawaki, who specialized in the study of the Mongolian language at those institutions, ranks among the finest in the world.
The following is the preface to a book that I recently learned about from an advertisement at the bottom of a newspaper page and immediately purchased.
Emphasis in the text is mine.
Introduction
My book The True History of China 【1840–1949】 (supervised by Hidehiro Okada, published by Li Zi Publishing), issued by Business-sha in November 2011, received such a favorable response that even I, its author, was surprised, and by October 2014 it had gone through nine printings.
Moreover, in November 2015 and again in January 2016, Chinese-language editions translated into traditional Chinese characters were published in Taiwan, together with my book The True History of Manchuria 【1894–1956】 (supervised by Hidehiro Okada, Business-sha, published in 2013).
In The True History of China, I wrote quite frankly about how much of what had previously been accepted as established theory was mistaken, but what attracted particular attention was my exposure of the fact that Sun Yat-sen was actually a grandiloquent and outrageous liar, and of how he betrayed Japan and the Japanese people.
That is why I was astonished when Taiwanese people said that they wanted to translate this book.
It is truly gratifying that even the people of Taiwan, who revere Sun Yat-sen as the Father of the Nation, have come to want to know the true history of China.
Once an edition in traditional Chinese characters is published in Taiwan, intellectuals in Hong Kong and on the mainland will undoubtedly read it as well.
I believe that all Chinese people are themselves aware of how thoroughly everything written not only by their government but also by Chinese people is filled with lies.
The reason the aforementioned book ends with the birth of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 is that I am not an expert in contemporary Chinese history and did not believe that I was at all qualified to write the true history of the Chinese Communist Party.
My specialty is Mongolian history, and in particular, I obtained my doctorate for my study of the history of the Dzungars, the last Mongol nomadic empire, which swept across Central Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and threatened both the Qing dynasty and Russia.
Nevertheless, as I investigated everything connected with Mongolia, my interests expanded into Manchurian history and Korean history, and I also found myself becoming involved in the modern and contemporary history of Japan, which became deeply involved with Korea and Manchuria from the end of the nineteenth century onward.
Since I originally graduated from a department of Oriental history, I believe that I am also more knowledgeable about the general history of China than the average person.
However, because contemporary China is a troublesome and incomprehensible entity, I had no intention of venturing into it.
Because I firmly refused to write a sequel, Business-sha asked Professor Bunyu Ko, an old friend of my husband, Hidehiro Okada, to undertake it, and The True History of China 【1949–2013】 was published in 2013; I was relieved and grateful to Professor Ko.
However, readers of my book apparently also expressed hopes for a sequel by me, and Business-sha, without giving up, continued asking me to write one.
In desperation, I happened to say that if Professor Masahiro Miyazaki were to teach me various things, perhaps even I might be able to write a history of contemporary China, and that became the beginning of the plan for this book.
Takashi Karatsu, president of Business-sha, is well acquainted with Professor Miyazaki, and a planning meeting was immediately arranged. The discussion proceeded with astonishing speed: The True History of Contemporary China would be left for the future, and for the time being, we would publish a book of dialogues concerning China.
Professor Miyazaki updates his free email newsletter, “Masahiro Miyazaki’s International News—Quick Reading,” every day, and by October 2018 it had reached a cumulative total of more than 5,870 issues. By reading it every day, I learn about present conditions in China that the major media do not report and use that information as the basis for my judgments, so I cannot imagine that I could contribute anything to Professor Miyazaki.
Professor Miyazaki is the very model of a journalist: rather than simply trusting what others have written, he personally travels through every location and forms his own judgments. There is nothing about present conditions that he does not know, and there would surely be nothing he would need to ask me, so I thought, now this is a problem.
However, as you will understand if you read this book, I had already known Professor Miyazaki for quite some time through the “Michi no Kai,” presided over by Professor Kanji Nishio, and because he is a gentleman who is kind to everyone, he asked me questions that were easy for me to answer. Our conversation became lively and developed into a very enjoyable dialogue.
I read not only Professor Miyazaki’s email newsletter but also most of his recent books.
For the purpose of this dialogue, I purchased online and read both The Tragedy of China, published thirty years ago, and The Great Disintegration of China, published twenty years ago.
I also reread Understanding Chinese People Through Their Places of Origin (PHP Shinsho, 2006).
Professor Miyazaki’s views concerning Chinese culture and various other circumstances coincide completely with my own.
The absence of any areas of disagreement that might have led to heated arguments may be disappointing to readers, but are our views of China not still very much those of a minority within Japanese society?
However, when considering China’s future, I do not believe that things can possibly continue safely as they are.
I want every Japanese person to consider in advance what kind of resolve the Japanese people should have in confronting a great upheaval in China.
My conclusion after Professor Miyazaki taught me about contemporary China is that it will remain impossible for the time being to write “The True History of the People’s Republic of China.”
The reason is that the statistics produced by the Chinese are filled with lies, and there is no truth in what they have written. How, then, could a true history possibly be written using such things as historical materials?
The study of history is a discipline that clarifies causal relationships by tracing backward from the results after events have ended; it is not something capable of describing events while they are still unfolding.
Of course, I intend to continue watching contemporary China with interest, but I would be grateful if you would understand that a sequel to The True History of China cannot be written until after the Chinese Communist Party has come to an end.

Junko Miyawaki