Free Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 by Rana Mitter

reassessing Chiang outside the existing Cold War templates.
    Mao Zedong has been reassessed in several major biographies in recent years. All are marked by a great deal of assiduous research, but take different views on this most controversial of figures. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story (London, 2006) provides a great deal of new detail, and assesses Mao in ultimately negative terms. Philip Short, Mao: A Life (London, 2001), and Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine, Mao: The Real Story (New York, 2012), suggest that Mao both made important contributions to the revolution and committed terrible crimes. A fine guide to the controversies over Mao is Timothy Cheek, ed., A Critical Introduction to Mao (Cambridge, 2010).
    It is still difficult, though no longer impossible, to discuss Wang Jingwei in China without his being dismissed as a mere traitor and therefore of no further interest. One of the earliest biographies is still among the very best and most nuanced works on Wang: John Hunter Boyle’s China and Japan at War, 1937–1945: The Politics of Collaboration (Stanford, CA, 1972). There are also useful insights in Gerald Bunker, The Peace Conspiracy: Wang Ching-wei and the China War, 1937–1941 (Cambridge, MA, 1972).
     
    THE NATIONALISTS: THE POLITICAL, SOCIAL, AND MILITARY HISTORY OF WARTIME
     
    Perhaps the most significant military history of the war in recent years is Hans J. van de Ven, War and Nationalism in China, 1925–1945 (London, 2003), which draws important revisionist conclusions on a whole variety of topics from the relationship between Stilwell and Chiang to military and food security during the war, embedded in an argument that revises the view that the Nationalist war effort was unimportant and ill-managed. For details of individual campaigns, Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans van de Ven, eds., The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 (Stanford, CA, 2011), is essential. These works are in some sense a response to the classic works of an earlier generation: Lloyd Eastman’s Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937–1949 (Stanford, CA, 1984), is condemnatory of a regime that he characterizes as already flawed and doomed to collapse, and Hsi-sheng Chi, Nationalist China at War: Military Defeats and Political Collapse, 1937–1945 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1982), details the way that military disaster fueled the disintegration of the government. Aaron William Moore, Writing War: Soldiers Record the Japanese Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2013), has powerful new material from Nationalist soldiers. John Garver’s Chinese-Soviet Relations, 1937–1945: The Diplomacy of Chinese Nationalism (Oxford, 1988) deals ably with the diplomacy of the period between China and the USSR.
    Morris Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change (Cambridge, MA, 2005), and Mark W. Frazier, The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace: State, Revolution, and Labor Management (Cambridge, 2002), are examples of revisionist work that attributes significant social formations in the post-1949 era to wartime changes under the Nationalists.
     
    THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE WEST AND CHINA
     
    Revisionist views of the alliance between the Western powers and China during the Second World War are covered in Van de Ven, War and Nationalism , and Taylor, Generalissimo . The more long-standing view that Chiang’s regime was an unworthy ally for the West is detailed in Barbara Tuchman’s Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945 (New York, 1971). Older works, including Herbert Feis, The China Tangle: The American Effort in China from Pearl Harbor to the Marshall Mission (Princeton, NJ, 1953), also expose how raw the wounds of the experience in China were in American public life during the early Cold War. Tom Buchanan, East Wind: China and the British Left, 1925–1976 (Oxford, 2012),