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

in Northwest China, 1934–1945 (Stanford, CA, 1997); Dagfinn Gatu, Village China at War: The Impact of Resistance to Japan, 1937–1945 (Vancouver, 2008); Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution: The Communist Movement in Eastern and Central China, 1937–1945 (Berkeley, CA, 1986); Odoric Wou, Mobilizing the Masses: Building Revolution in Henan (Stanford, CA, 1994); and Sherman Xiaogang Lai, A Springboard to Victory: Shandong Province and Chinese Communist Military and Financial Strength, 1937–1945 (Leiden, 2011).
    The opening of new sources in Russia and China has revived a debate about how far Mao’s revolution drew on Stalin and how far it was indigenous. Although it is clear that neither explanation is sufficient in itself, a necessary and useful corrective to any idea that Mao’s revolution was entirely separate from that of Stalin’s is Michael Sheng, Battling Western Imperialism: Mao, Stalin, and the United States (Princeton, NJ, 1997).
     
    INTELLIGENCE
     
    Wartime China was the scene of a variety of murky intelligence operations, many of which remain mysterious to this day. The China sections of Richard Aldrich, Intelligence and the War against Japan: Britain, America, and the Politics of Secret Service (Cambridge, 2000), are very useful for understanding the position from the Western point of view, as is Yu Maochun, OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War (New Haven, CT, 1997). Chinese intelligence efforts are detailed in essays in the special edition of Intelligence and National Security 16:4 (2001), ed. Hans van de Ven. Dai Li’s role is analyzed in Frederic Wakeman Jr., Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service (Berkeley, CA, 2003).
     
    COLLABORATION WITH THE JAPANESE
     
    This remains a touchy subject, and for political reasons it has mostly not yet developed the nuance that has marked studies of European wartime collaboration. A path-breaking work is Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Chinese Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge, MA, 2005), which discusses the messy reality of local compromise in the Yangtze delta in the years after the invasion. A very useful edited volume is David Barrett and Larry Shyu, Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932–1945: The Limits of Accommodation (Stanford, CA, 2001). Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation (Cambridge, 2004), gives vivid details of the fate of Shanghai after 1937. For the occupation and subsequent collaboration that set the stage for the invasion of China, see Rana Mitter, The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley, CA, 2000). A compelling insight into the mind-set that led to “collaborationist nationalism” is Margherita Zanasi, Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China (Chicago, IL, 2006). Brian G. Martin, “Shield of Collaboration: The Wang Jingwei Regime’s Security Service, 1939–1945,” Intelligence and National Security 16:4 (2001), and “Collaboration within Collaboration: Zhou Fohai’s Relations with the Chongqing Government, 1942–1945,” Twentieth-Century China 34:2 (April 2008), provide a comprehensive view of the use of intelligence and security by Wang Jingwei’s government to try to solidify its position.
     
    ARTS AND CULTURE
     
    The war saw the transformation of the cultural and artistic world in China. So far there has been more work on the Communist contributions to cultural change during that period than on the Nationalists. Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945 (Berkeley, CA, 1994), analyzes a variety of wartime cultural forms including the press, cartoons, and performance art. The dilemmas of literary figures in occupied Shanghai are considered in Edward M. Gunn Jr., Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking, 1937–1945 (New York, 1980), and Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in