Reinterpreted historiography has been an integral part of the modernizing project in post-Mao China, and among the most important of those reassessments has been the significance of the second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). In academic and popular culture, official and grassroots memory, the 1980s and 1990s have seen significant changes in what China chooses to remember and forget about the period of perhaps China's greatest single trauma of the twentieth century. This article examines written sources (historical and literary texts) and institutional structures (museums) in assessing how contemporary international and domestic politics have affected the way the Chinese use the experience and memory of the war to shape debates about politics and identity, and also offers some comparisons with the parallel period of historical transition in Taiwan.