by Marcela Ganea
BUCHAREST, Nov. 27 (Xinhua) -- In order to understand contemporary China and its evolution, one has to study the War of Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-1945), Romanian writer and scholar Anna Eva Budura told Xinhua recently.
"I have published books about China in World War II (WWII) because I realized very little was known, and because China's anti-Japanese resistance is a neuralgic point in contemporary history," she said in an interview with Xinhua in her apartment in Bucharest.
"China had been Japan's teacher, and now the disciple was raising the hand to hit the teacher," said Budura, who has been studying Chinese culture and history since 1973 and has published several studies and books on China.
Budura did her bachelor degree in Beijing University and lived in China for 20 years. Her PhD research was focused on the War of Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.
Budura and her husband, Romulus Budura, were among the first group of overseas Romanian students pursuing academic studies in China in the 1950s after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. They majored in Chinese language and literature.
The more she studied documents and press archives, the more she realized that "in order to understand contemporary China and its evolution, one has to study the War of Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression."
"In my PhD work, which took me almost 10 years, I followed the historical events unfolding on China's battlefields, including those in the anti-Japanese resistance," she said.
"I wanted to understand that, despite the two forces existing in China (the Nationalist Party-led force and the Communist Party-led force) at the time, respectively headed by Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) and Mao Zedong (1893-1976), the war united them in a war of the entire Chinese nation, and marked the path China took after WWII," the author said.
"Historical facts raise the awareness of the generations that did not experience the horrible war of aggression, whose victims were the Chinese nation and other Asian nations, including the Japanese nation, about the need to cut all acts of aggression from the root," she explained her research objective.
Budura's first book on China is a collection of documents and articles about China, titled Romanian People's Traditions of Solidarity and Friendship With the Chinese People, published in 1973.
The other books on China written by Budura, who is in her 70s, include Anti-fascist and Anti-imperialist Resistance in Asia and Africa between 1931-1941, The Triumph of the Dragon -- China during WWII, Chinese Diplomacy - Historical and Spiritual Assumptions.
