Since the second half of the 20th century, the study of the history of the War of Resistance against Japan in the English-language scholarly community has undergone a series of changes, from the traditional fields of revolutionary history and political history to the detailed examination of military history and social history, as well as grassroots Sino-American relations. At the same time, the global study of the history of the War of Resistance against Japan in English has also benefited from the discovery and compilation of English historical materials from various places. In addition to the military history of the Anti-Japanese War and the re-examination of the history of Sino-American relations, the new trend of the study of the history of the Anti-Japanese War in the English-language academic community since the beginning of the 21st century is mainly reflected in the relevant research on the social history of the War and the history of daily life such as refugees, suffering, women, children, and wartime medical care. Moreover, databases represented by the ″Anti-Japanese War Literature Data Platform″ have sorted out a large number of rare English newspapers and archives of the War in recent years, laying a solid foundation for the study of the history of the War of Resistance against Japan.

Chairs for research on the Holocaust were established in only two universities in Germany: the Goethe University in Frankfurt, where the first professorship has been created since 2017, followed by the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. Of all the courses on the Holocaust taught in German universities, only one-third focus on the actual historical events. Currently, there are no German universities offering a Master of Arts program on the Holocaust. Although the Holocaust is an international field of research, there are no appointments of international scholars to senior positions in German academia, which remains parochial and inward-looking. This article provides a critical review of the current state of university teaching, institutional infrastructure, memorial sites and historical research on the Holocaust in Germany, and the future challenges facing the field.

Unlike any other events and battles of the Anti-Japanese War, the Nanjing Massacre was an atrocity committed by Japanese soldiers against civilians and a crime against humanity. It should be remembered in human history like the Holocaust against Jews committed by Nazi Germany, which has received worldwide concerns for 80 years. Poetic justice is more profound than legal justice. In the contemporary narratives of the Nanjing Massacre, the novels of YE Zhaoyan, FANG Wei and HA Jin, as well as the documentary of ZHANG Chunru, employ different narrative forms and exhibit different writing styles, but all point to the ultimate and unending question of human destiny or condition revealed by Malraux and Arendt.

Facing the memory crisis caused by the successive passing of Nanjing Massacre survivors and the dwindling number of living historical witnesses, the responsibility for sustaining and disseminating survivors′ memories has gradually shifted to their descendants. Due to the political situation and the ″unspeakable″ nature of the trauma, survivors remained silent about their traumatic memories for a long time until the 1980s, when the status of the Nanjing Massacre agenda was elevated. At the same time, the survivors′ active narratives catalyzed the internal transmission of massacre memories within their families. Through survivors′ oral testimonies and physical presence, supplemented by spatial sites and memorial installations beyond family settings, traumatic memories have been increasingly transmitted and embedded in the memories of their descendants. In this context, survivors′ traumatic memories constitute the cornerstone of their descendants′ autobiographical memory narratives, while the descendants achieve boundary expansion and re-contextualization of survivors′ memories through the collaborative shaping of multiple memory narratives.

This paper mainly takes some memoirs and oral materials of history published since the new century as the primary sources to reexamine three types of narratives about the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression from three dimensions: the personalized narrative of suffering, the narrative of cultural-oriented resistance against Japanese invasion, and the historical reflection transcending the boundaries of nation-states. From the perspective of life stories and life experiences of individuals, it intends to interpret how the Chinese intellectuals, students and the common people personally experienced, witnessed and reflected on the collective experiences and national traumas caused by the Anti-Japanese War. Furthermore, it attempts to discuss the contents presented in these memoirs and oral materials from multiple perspectives, including those of individual and state, history and memory, experience and rationality, nationalism and humanism.

In the postwar period, Japan propagated the Hiroshima memory centered on the suffering of the weak, strategically employing the imagery of ″womanhood″ to construct an innocent victimhood narrative in the context of the atomic bombing. Within atomic bomb literature and arts, gendered representations are conspicuously foregrounded—figures such as the ″Hiroshima maiden″ and the ″Hiroshima mother″ are deliberately emphasized as political tropes. The ″maiden″, as a symbol of nuclear victimhood, seeks to evoke an international perception of Hiroshima as a helpless sacrifice, while postwar discourses surrounding the ″mother″ further reinforce the historical memory of ordinary Japanese citizens as victims of militarist aggression. By instrumentalizing this framework of memory domination, Japan extends the archetype of women as ″pure and blameless″ peace advocates to the entire populace, thereby obscuring its wartime perpetration and resisting national accountability. Women thus become fully enmeshed in sustaining the myth of Japanese collective victimhood, spanning both wartime and postwar narratives. Simultaneously, the trope of ″womanhood″ operates not only as a metonym for Hiroshima but also as an allegory for Japan itself—a nation rhetorically recast as passive, wounded, and morally untainted.

There are a lot of literary works, especially in Southeast Asia and North America, on the Anti-Japanese War in the Sinophone literature. Due to their identity transformation from ″overseas Chinese″ to ″Chinese″, the Southeast Asian Chinese writers experienced an ideological evolution from the Chinese nationalist stance to the identity of the emerging nation-state when they wrote about the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, which had a profound impact on their narrative form from the traditional chapter-by-chapter style to the modernist/postmodernist narrative style. When creating literary works on the Anti-Japanese War, Sinophone writers in North America tended to, in a way of ″response″ and ″recalling″, describe stories of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression by incorporating democratic ideas, reviewing the history of the Anti-Japanese War, expressing female trauma, and focusing on identity recognition, and form a global vision through cross-domain writing and universal expression. The narrative form of the anti-Japanese War themes in North American Chinese literature showed a trend of evolution from traditional simple realism to refined realism.

Artificial intelligence algorithms significantly shape discretion in grassroots governance. Automated, predictive, and generative algorithms each uniquely impact grassroots discretion. While automated algorithms may weaken discretion, predictive and generative algorithms can enhance decision-making capacity, albeit with new challenges. Further analysis shows that the impact of algorithms on grassroots discretion is complex, being moderated by individual cognition, organizational system, and organizational culture. At the individual cognitive level, grassroots staff may depend on or counter algorithms due to algorithmic or cognitive biases. At the organizational system level, the separation of algorithmic decision-making and execution affects autonomy, but internal feedback and supervision mechanisms help sustain discretion. At the organizational culture level, the control-oriented culture may restrict discretion, while an autonomy-oriented culture may enhance governance capabilities.

Intelligent discipline inspection is not only to meet the needs of power supervision in the digital age, but also to adapt to the national anti-corruption goal. Compared with digital supervision, the concept of intelligent discipline inspection and supervision emphasizes the use of intelligent technology and the humanistic care shown by technology. At present, the intelligent discipline inspection and supervision shows the practice pattern of workflow type, early warning analysis type and auxiliary case handling type, the essence of which is to build an integrated, accurate, element-oriented and holographic discipline inspection and supervision system. However, the intelligent discipline inspection and supervision also presents the imbalance of the relationship between technology and system in the institutional dimension, the expansion effect of supervision power in the power dimension, the deconstruction of supervision procedures in the procedural dimension, and the closed problem of algorithmic technology in the technical dimension. In the future, the intelligent discipline inspection and supervision should clearly define the framework for the innovation of the discipline inspection system and mechanism promoted by technology empowerment and the ″technology-driving + legal guidance″, and construct the system in a dual way of wisdom and rule of law. Specifically, it includes improving the intelligent discipline inspection and supervision normative system at the institutional level, reshaping the relationship between power and rights of the intelligent discipline inspection and supervision at the power level, controlling the technology application process in the procedural aspect, and promoting the responsiveness and responsibility of algorithmic technology at the algorithmic level.

Currently, disciplinary inspection and supervision agencies are facing many challenges such as a sharp increase in the number of cases and the demand of high-quality handling of cases. Empowering the disciplinary inspection and supervision agencies with artificial intelligence is a crucial method and means for seizing opportunities and addressing challenges. Artificial intelligence technology has played a conspicuous role in the panoramic management of disciplinary inspection and supervision cases, tracking case clues, improving prevention effectiveness, and intelligent analysis of similar case handling information. However, the legal risks caused by artificial intelligence technology need to be urgently addressed, including the objectivity of results affected by shortage of information data and algorithmic defects, erosion of the exclusive nature of supervisory power due to the dependence of investigators on technology, and challenge of the traditional disciplinary inspection and supervision accountability mechanisms due to algorithmic decision-making biases. Therefore, measures should be taken to improve the use of artificial intelligence to assist disciplinary inspection and supervision in handling cases, including promoting centralized and unified data resources, improving algorithm security and transparency, constructing a reasonable labor division mechanism of ″human-machine coupling″, improving the technical level of disciplinary inspection and supervision agencies, and clarifying the boundaries and allocation of human-machine responsibilities.

The public′s sense of gain in anti-corruption work is a key index for evaluating the effectiveness of anti-corruption work, and there is a close relationship between government information disclosure and public′s sense of gain in anti-corruption work. By constructing an analytical framework based on the social interconstruction theory and conducting an empirical analysis of the CSS2019 survey data, it is found that disclosure of government information helps to resolve the problem of information asymmetry in the principal-agent relationship, and has a significant positive impact on the sense of gain in anti-corruption work. Meanwhile, exposure to online information will increase the negative impression of the public about the effectiveness of the government′s anti-corruption work. From the perspective of intermediary effect, disclosure of government information helps to improve the public′s perception of social equity, enhance the public′s institutional participation, thereby improving the public′s sense of gain in anti-corruption work. Looking to the future, we should prioritize the public demand-driven transparency, establish a government information supply system that meets the heterogeneous needs of individuals, reasonably allocate anti-corruption work attention, and regulate political participation forms, so as to continuously and effectively enhance the public′s sense of gain in anti-corruption work.

The proactive work and entrepreneurship of local governments are key to China′s remarkable economic development achievements. However, the inadequacy of past supervision and accountability mechanisms has also posed high risks of corruption due to power abuse, affecting the smooth progress of Chinese modernization. The Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China emphasized the need to ″persist in governing the Party with a reform-oriented spirit and strict standards.″ Therefore, how to effectively supervise and constrain the exercise of power while motivating local governments to work and engage in entrepreneurship has become an urgent issue for the Party and state governance. Consequently, this paper constructs an analytical framework for the integration and coordination of incentives for local work and entrepreneurship with supervision and accountability, revealing the internal logic of changes in local behavior through two core variables: incentives for delegation of power and accountability for control of power. It also proposes moderately relaxing the regulation of residual rights under the mechanism of digital technology-enabled supervision and accountability to motivate local governments to actively work and engage in entrepreneurship.