The Academic Discussion of the ‘Comfort Women’ in the PRC

This article provides the reader with an outline of academic research on comfort women in China: its development and its main topics, the disciplines involved in the discourse and the timeline of events triggering and intensifying research in this area are discussed. Using a quantitative as well as a qualitative approach, I attempt to position these debates firstly within international discourses and secondly within general PRC historiography. The hypothesis being proposed is that in terms of topic as well as concerning the mode of research and presentation, comfort women-related research has been strongly influenced by an imagined Japanese revisionist interlocutor.