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

charts the mobilization of British leftist opinion in favor of the Chinese war effort; and Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War against Japan, 1941–1945 (Oxford, 1978), shows how fraught relations between the US and Britain often left China caught in the middle. The Burma campaign is dealt with in brilliant, horrific detail in Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (London, 2004). Frank McLynn, The Burma Campaign: Disaster into Triumph, 1942–1945 (New Haven, CT, 2011), gives compelling portraits of the Western commanders. There is a very thoughtful essay on China’s wartime relations with the wider world in chapter 7 of Odd Arne Westad’s Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750 (London, 2012).
     
    WAR ATROCITIES
     
    On the Nanjing Massacre, rigorous studies have emerged in recent years that give a clear account of what the historically valid parameters of debate on these and related questions are. Among them are Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, The Nanking Atrocity, 1937–1938: Complicating the Picture (Oxford, 2007); Joshua Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley, CA, 2000); Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the ‘Rape of Nanking’: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (New York, 2006); and Daqing Yang, “Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing,” American Historical Review 104:3 (1999). Although some of this work takes issue with it, a significant proportion of the Anglophone debate in the 2000s was stimulated by the publication of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking (New York, 1997). Accounts of other war atrocities are to be found in Diana Lary and Stephen R. MacKinnon, eds., The Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern China , and James Flath and Norman Smith, eds., Beyond Suffering: Recounting War in Modern China (Vancouver, 2011).
     
    THE COMMUNISTS AND THEIR REVOLUTION
     
    The origins of the Communist peasant revolution in wartime China have been a central theme in the study of modern Chinese political and social history for some decades. The debate was started by Chalmers Johnson’s classic Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945 (Stanford, CA, 1962), which argued for the CCP’s ability to stimulate anti-Japanese nationalism as the key factor in the rise of the Communists. This was answered by Mark Selden in The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, MA, 1971), which argued instead for social revolution and a more self-sufficient economic model as the reasons for Mao’s success. A variety of important studies then added nuance to the debate in the following years, for example Kathleen Hartford and Steven M. Goldstein, eds., Single Sparks: China’s Rural Revolutions (Armonk, NY, 1989). The debate on the origins of the rural revolution is synthesized very effectively in Suzanne Pepper, “The Political Odyssey of an Intellectual Construct: Peasant Nationalism and the Study of China’s Revolutionary History: A Review Essay,” Journal of Asian Studies 63:1 (2004).
    The concentration on Mao is understandable, but runs the danger of ignoring important Communist activity outside Yan’an. On Communist base areas and resistance outside Yan’an see, for instance, Gregor Benton’s monumental Mountain Fires: The Red Army’s Three-Year War in South China, 1934–1938 (Berkeley, CA, 1992), and New Fourth Army: Communist Resistance Along the Yangtze and the Huai, 1938–1941 (Berkeley, CA, 1999); David Goodman, Social and Political Change in Revolutionary China: The Taihang Base Area in the War of Resistance to Japan, 1937–1945 (Lanham, MD, 2000); Pauline Keating, David Goodman, and Feng Chongyi, eds., North China at War: The Social Ecology of Revolution (Armonk, NY, 1999); Pauline Keating, Two Revolutions: Village Reconstruction and the Cooperative Movement