The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949 (S. C. M. Paine)

The author has an important thesis, as this reader commented in Goodreads. To quote the author:

In other words, the long Chinese civil war precipitated a regional war between China and Japan so that by the time the conflict became global in 1941, the Chinese were fighting a civil war within a regional war within an overarching global war.

By that, she was trying to show the complexity of the war in China which she felt was treated in an overly simplistic fashion by the powers of that time, and the historians of our time.

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This book is remarkable for a few reasons. First of all not only are English books on this part of World War 2 relatively scarce, the author has a proposition: the war fought in China actually had a significant impact on the Second World War and can only be properly understood by examining the intricate relationships between a civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, a regional war that includes Japan (and more inconspicuously Russia), and the Global War, also known as World War 2. This is an interesting proposition, but to convince the reader through her narrative is an ambitious task, and I shall share my take on it later.

The second reason why this book is amazing is the author knows Chinese and Japanese and was therefore able to make references to many original documents. But beyond knowing the language, Prof Paine was able to show a more intimate knowledge of the Chinese and how they look at things. Finally, the scholarship is quite impeccable, one can tell not just from the amount of literature consulted (the references of which occupied a third of the book) but also from how she critique the literature in the first chapter of the book, and adding more throughout the book as the need arises. With good scholarship, one is left after reading the book to ponder upon many questions, some of which the author briefly alluded to. In order not to spoil it, I shall list, rather than quote from any part of the book.

1. A chapter was dedicated to Russia, indicating its importance. But Russia was to come back near the end, and indeed was always active in the background throughout the book. Exactly how instrumental was Russia in the whole scheme of things?
2. Did Chiang Kai-Shek, educated in Japan, make the same mistakes the Japanese made by focusing too much on operational success against the Communists, thereby trading away strategic initiatives?
3. Exactly how did both the Communists and the Nationalists view the Japanese? The populace, especially the students of that era were galvanised by a sense of nationalism to become strongly anti-Japanese. But were the Japanese just a convenient boogey-man in the eyes or both Communists and the Nationalists?

There are a few specific things that I would like to point out in praise of the author. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, the author knows the Chinese language well and was therefore able to know some of the quirks of the language, for example being able to explain that Huai-Hai from the Huai-Hai Campaign is actually the amalgamation of the words Hua-he (淮河) and Hai-zhou (海州) which define the theatre. Another example is her use of  Chinese idioms at the start of each chapter which aptly describes the essence of the chapters.

In terms of her style and prose, the author is engaging and captivating. Some may feel that she has given too much details but these are necessary to flesh out her narrative to support her proposition. She was occasionally capable of humor (see pages 164 and 186). But most important of all she was able to portray the tragedy of the whole war vividly not by describing the sufferings of the soldiers and civilians on all sides, but the ironies of the outcomes of the war. She did this on three occasions (in ascending order of impact on me):

1. When she hinted that Chiang Kai-Shek might be right in the early stages of the regional war about fact that the bigger threat to him was the Communists and not the Japanese whom he thought would eventually leave.
2. When she recapitulated the reasons for Japan to embark on this misadventure (which could have been hugely successful) and how Japan eventually ended up (pg 219).
3. When she alluded to how Japan might have been right about the menace of the Russia and the spread of its ideology given how the West spent the next 45 years trying to contain it (see pg 284 for example).

Lastly, Prof Paine was rather accurate in her assessment of how the Nationalists were looked at from the eyes of many Chinese, in my view. Whether our opinions of the Nationalists were informed, they surely lost the PR war to the Communists.

As for the supporting materials provided, I particularly like the Chronology section included in the book which listed out the sequence of events clearly. As for the maps, as I am not one with high expectations, I find those included sufficient for my needs.

If I have any disagreements with the author, it is in regard to how she explained the rapid capitulation of the Nationalists after losing in Manchuria. While her use of the Chinese' idea of viewing time as a series of  'cycles' rather than in a linear fashion is novel, I feel it is a little simplistic. It is true that Chinese believe that dynasties (and even right down to individuals) expires at some point and another dynasty would take over, starting the cycle again, this does not always make people jump off the 'sinking ship' and change sides. And comparing how the Nationalists defected to how the the Germans "fought grimly back to Berlin" may not be appropriate because I think the Germans' determination may have something to do with the fact that they view their fight back to Berlin as defending their homeland against another country (in this case Russia). The Chinese were engaged in a civil war, changing sides does not mean selling out their country. That may make it easier to change sides, and may not necessarily be due to their belief that the Nationalists' 气数已尽 (my words, meaning 'time is up'). To know what it is for the individual soldiers caught in that civil war, one can refer to 大江大海：一九四九 by 龍應台 (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6902548?ac=1).

Finally, how do I feel about Prof Paine's effort to support her proposition? We should remember that this is no mean feat, for if one does too good a job at isolating the three layers of war (civil, regional, and global) for clarity, they start to look like unrelated events and the proposition is not supported. On the other hand, if one tries to mix the three layers too intimately, a reader would find it hard to untangle the layers and may accuse the author of doing a sloppy job. Finding the right balance is critical and yet terribly hard. In this, I would say that Prof Paine has been very successful in helping me to see the interplay of these three layers, thereby educating me that at every step between 1911 and 1949, the decisions made by all the parties involved in the war in one way or another are affected by their views of the world, their assumptions about their adversaries and allies, and the tactical moves and miscalculations made by their enemies, some of whom can be their own party members.

In the Conclusion, the author tried to demonstrate the confluence of events that led to an outcome, whereby the absence of any one of more may conceivably change the results significantly. This thought-provoking section leads the reader to many 'what-if' questions and I shall close with one of my own. What if the earliest events in this book were to occur a few years later, right when the Cold War was getting hot? Would Japan's occupation's of Manchuria not be warmly welcomed by the West as a contribution towards checking the spread of Communism in Asia? Then what?

This is not just a book to be read, but to be owned. Just Chapter 7 alone would have made it worth the while.

(Find this book at Goodreads)