"China was defeated during the first Sino-Japanese war and Japan was defeated during World War II including the second Sino-Japanese war. Since then, the relationship between China and Japan has varied between good and bad. This book does not discuss various trivial disputes between China and Japan; instead it considers the real cause, which is the competition to become a Pacific Empire, which would lead to the third Sino-Japanese war and would eventually challenge the current Pacific Empire, the United States of America. Under such a circumstance, the book discusses various aspects on the third Sino-Japanese war from a Chinese viewpoint."--Publisher's description.
In Rana Mitter's tense, moving and hugely important book, the war between China and Japan - one of the most important struggles of the Second World War - at last gets the masterly history it deserves.
The Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1937 led some thirty million Chinese to flee their homes in terror, and live—in the words of artist and writer Feng Zikai—“in a sea of bitterness” as refugees. Keith Schoppa paints a comprehensive picture of the refugee experience in one province—Zhejiang, on the central Chinese coast—where the Japanese launched major early offensives as well as notorious later campaigns. He recounts stories of both heroes and villains, of choices poorly made amid war’s bewildering violence, of risks bravely taken despite an almost palpable quaking fear. As they traveled south into China’s interior, refugees stepped backward in time, sometimes as far as the nineteenth century, their journeys revealing the superficiality of China’s modernization. Memoirs and oral histories allow Schoppa to follow the footsteps of the young and old, elite and non-elite, as they fled through unfamiliar terrain and coped with unimaginable physical and psychological difficulties. Within the context of Chinese culture, being forced to leave home was profoundly threatening to one’s sense of identity. Not just people but whole institutions also fled from Japanese occupation, and Schoppa considers schools, governments, and businesses as refugees with narratives of their own. Local governments responded variously to Japanese attacks, from enacting scorched-earth policies to offering rewards for the capture of plague-infected rats in the aftermath of germ warfare. While at times these official procedures improved the situation for refugees, more often—as Schoppa describes in moving detail—they only deepened the tragedy.
This project offers the first English-language general history of military operations during the Sino-Japanese war based on Japanese, Chinese, and Western sources.
In 1937, Japan blundered into a debilitating war with China, beginning with a minor incident near Peking (now Beijing) that quickly escalated. The Japanese won significant battles and captured the capital, Nanking, after a horrific massacre of its citizens. Chiang Kai-shek, China's acknowledged leader, would not surrender--each side believed it could win a war of attrition. The U.S. sided with China, primarily because of President Roosevelt's personal bias in their favor. Drawing on a wealth of sources including interviews with key players, from soldiers to diplomats, this history traces America's unexpected and unpopular involvement in an Asian conflict, and the growing recognition of Japan's threat to world peace and the inevitability of war.
This is the third in a series of volumes detailing the history of Soviet foreign policy from the Great Depression to the Great Patriotic War. It covers Soviet policy in the Far East from the Japanese rejection of a non-aggression pact in January 1933 to the conclusion of a neutrality pact in April 1941. During the course of that period the Soviet Union moved from being the vulnerable and isolated suitor to a position of negotiation from strength.
