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h i s t o r y the neighbourhood, was uncompromising: ‘We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out.’ As a result Bahadur’s early days in America were full of hostility and paranoia. Her father had someone spit in his face as he waited innocently at a traffic light, while one member of their community was so badly beaten with baseball bats that he was left permanently disabled. Bahadur begins and ends Coolie Woman by exploring the sense of alienation that her family’s history of serial migration has generated. She is a person with many countries, none of which feels entirely like home. When she returns to Guyana, where she was born, she no longer feels she belongs; the country is in confusion and she cannot imagine making a life there. And when she goes back to India, she finds her behaviour is too free, too immodest to be acceptable to those around her. It is no wonder that she describes migration as ‘like stepping into a magician’s box’, where ‘the sawing in half was just a trick’. She notes that when her family moved, ‘everything seemed to split apart. Time became twofold … Space was also sundered, torn slowly and excruciatingly into two conflicting realms.’ But in time she recovered, certainly enough to research this fascinating story, which will have resonance for millions of others who are swept up and transformed by history and have to find a new way to create ‘home’. To order this book for £20, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 38 odd a r n e we s ta d Road to Pearl Harbor China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival By Rana Mitter (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 458pp £25) States are forged by war and modern China is no exception. Between 1894 and 1953 the country had less than a decade of peace, and war laid waste to significant parts of the country. But out of these sixty years of strife came a state so cohesive and powerful that it has been able to shift its economy from capitalism to socialism and back again without losing power. The state also learned how to terrorise its own population and get away with it. This is what wars teach states, except in cases when a welleducated and politicised citizenry demands that other lessons be learned. No war did more to shape today’s China than the Second World War, and Rana Mitter’s new book is an outstanding account of how the country fought that war and survived it. The war against Japan created modern China, Mitter argues, even though the group that came to be the war’s main beneficiary – the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – differed in its political ideology from Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime government. Chiang’s party bore the main brunt of the war effort and suffered as a consequence, not only in losses but also in the damage caused to inner cohesion and financial viability. But the lessons from the war were applied assiduously by Chiang’s Chinese enemies, the CCP, when they wrested power from the government in 1949 and set up their own state. The war against Japan that broke out in 1937 was one that China was woefully Mao Zedong speaking in Yan’an, May 1938 unprepared to fight. Most of the wars since the last Sino-Japanese War in 1894–5 had been domestic, or those fought with the limited contribution of a foreign power. From the very beginning this was a different kind of war. Japan intended conquest and her express purpose was to destroy China as an independent country. This time, China’s leaders were facing one of the world’s major powers in a full onslaught. And they were facing it alone. A lot of nonsense has been written about the differences between Chinese and Japanese paths of development since the mid-19th century, which – we are assured – gave Japan all the advantages and China none. Japan got it right, at least as far as power is concerned, it is assumed. The reality is much more complex, and Japan’s advantages in 1937 were more contingent than received wisdom allows. Chiang had been preparing for war, but his government had done so with one hand tied behind its back, since it always had to contend with other power holders in China (including the communists). As a state, his version of ‘new China’ had been born during a global depression, with the economic weakness which that entailed. And Chiang knew, as did everyone else in the 1930s, that building a powerful army takes time. Japan had been at it since the 1870s; Chiang’s national revolution went back only to 1927. As Mitter shows, it is also a myth that the outbreak of total war between the two countries in 1937 was the inevitable result of long-term enmities. Relations between China and Japan had been characterised by ups and downs since the late 19th century and in spite of an earlier war there had been at least as much cooperation as conflict. Literary Review | d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 3 / j a n u a r y 2 0 1 4 10
page 13
h i s t o r y Japan attacked in 1937 because its leaders were afraid that Chiang would succeed in building a strong army and state in an alliance with one or several Western powers. This was Tokyo’s nightmare scenario: a strengthened China that could help to contain Japan on behalf of the West. Tokyo’s paranoia in 1937–8 did not much concern itself with which Western power would confront it – Germany and the USSR at first figured as prominently as the United States and Britain. What mattered was that a Chinese revival would benefit Japan’s potential enemies. The Japanese casus belli also explains why this deeply unnecessary war proved so hard to settle. At first, in 1937 and 1938, Tokyo believed that total victory was in sight, as more and more territory was conquered and the Chinese forces were driven further and further west. The Japanese therefore pressed on, even though their China experts warned of a military quagmire ahead. And in 1939 and 1940, as that quagmire had become a reality, with Japanese losses rising and Chinese resistance becoming fiercer, Chiang Kai-shek saw no reason to settle, since he no longer believed that sacrificing territory would buy peace. Chiang had another reason to hold out. He was sure that the United States would soon enter the war and China would gain a powerful ally. When Japan finally committed the ultimate strategic folly and attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Chiang’s thoughts – committed to his diary – were similar to those of Winston Churchill half a world away: he went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful. The Sino-Japanese War was in effect two wars – one before and one after December 1941. Access to Allied supplies and Allied strategic advice made it easier for China to resist Japan, in spite of the many disagreements between Chiang and his mainly American sponsors about how best to fight. It is true, as Mitter points out, that China kept losing the war after 1941. But it did so at a slower rate than before and at a greater cost to Japan. This was of course why Chiang received so much US aid (though infinitely less than Britain and the Soviets): President Roosevelt funded Chiang not because he thought the Chinese would win the war, but because they held down about a third of the fighting strength of the Japanese imperial army, troops that otherwise would have been fighting the Americans in the Pacific. The Japanese atrocities against Chinese civilians play an important role in the book. All sides in the war committed atrocities: at least half a million Chinese civilians drowned in 1938 when Chiang Kai-shek ordered the Yellow River’s floodgates opened to halt the Japanese advance. But the indiscriminate Japanese massacres of innocent people in Nanjing and elsewhere in China are in a class of their own. They were done as retaliation and by an occupying power already in control, as were the horrific ‘experiments’ carried out by Japanese doctors on Chinese prisoners throughout the war. The matter of Chinese collaboration is an important one and Mitter deals with it well in his book. His conclusion is striking: just as in German-occupied eastern Europe, a lot more people wanted to collaborate and would have done so if only the occupiers had made it easier for them to. Instead Japan, like Germany, put in place policies directed against the local population that quickly eroded any support a quisling government might have gained. It is still remarkable that – according to recent research in China – more Chinese in uniform died fighting for Japan than against Japan in the Sino-Japanese War. These figures obviously include Chinese from Japanese-controlled Taiwan and Manchuria, but even so the numbers are striking. That people were willing – if not always able – to collaborate tells us something important about the war. Chiang’s government fought in ways that alienated significant groups among the population it claimed to protect. The price China’s government paid for its survival was very high – probably so high that it contributed to the government’s downfall four years after the war ended and its replacement, through force, by a new dictatorial communist regime. Rana Mitter’s wonderful book gives us the story of Chinese heroism, of an almost unique ability to thrive in adversity and survive against the odds. But it also reminds us about the terrible cost for China of fighting the war, in both lives lost and opportunities squandered. To order this book for £20, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 38 THE UNIVERSITY OF BUCKINGHAM MA in biography Consistently rated ‘excellent’ by external examiners and inspectors The course will be taught by Jane Ridley and is based in London. Available full-time (12 months) or part-time, by research or as a taught MA. Courses start October or January. For more information visit www.buckingham.ac.uk/london/biography or email jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 3 / j a n u a r y 2 0 1 4 | Literary Review 11

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h i s t o r y the neighbourhood, was uncompromising: ‘We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out.’ As a result Bahadur’s early days in America were full of hostility and paranoia. Her father had someone spit in his face as he waited innocently at a traffic light, while one member of their community was so badly beaten with baseball bats that he was left permanently disabled.

Bahadur begins and ends Coolie Woman by exploring the sense of alienation that her family’s history of serial migration has generated. She is a person with many countries, none of which feels entirely like home. When she returns to Guyana, where she was born, she no longer feels she belongs; the country is in confusion and she cannot imagine making a life there. And when she goes back to India, she finds her behaviour is too free, too immodest to be acceptable to those around her. It is no wonder that she describes migration as ‘like stepping into a magician’s box’, where ‘the sawing in half was just a trick’. She notes that when her family moved, ‘everything seemed to split apart. Time became twofold … Space was also sundered, torn slowly and excruciatingly into two conflicting realms.’ But in time she recovered, certainly enough to research this fascinating story, which will have resonance for millions of others who are swept up and transformed by history and have to find a new way to create ‘home’. To order this book for £20, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 38

odd a r n e we s ta d

Road to Pearl Harbor China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival

By Rana Mitter (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 458pp £25)

States are forged by war and modern China is no exception. Between 1894 and 1953 the country had less than a decade of peace, and war laid waste to significant parts of the country. But out of these sixty years of strife came a state so cohesive and powerful that it has been able to shift its economy from capitalism to socialism and back again without losing power. The state also learned how to terrorise its own population and get away with it. This is what wars teach states, except in cases when a welleducated and politicised citizenry demands that other lessons be learned.

No war did more to shape today’s China than the Second World War, and Rana Mitter’s new book is an outstanding account of how the country fought that war and survived it. The war against Japan created modern China, Mitter argues, even though the group that came to be the war’s main beneficiary – the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – differed in its political ideology from Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime government. Chiang’s party bore the main brunt of the war effort and suffered as a consequence, not only in losses but also in the damage caused to inner cohesion and financial viability. But the lessons from the war were applied assiduously by Chiang’s Chinese enemies, the CCP, when they wrested power from the government in 1949 and set up their own state.

The war against Japan that broke out in 1937 was one that China was woefully

Mao Zedong speaking in Yan’an, May 1938

unprepared to fight. Most of the wars since the last Sino-Japanese War in 1894–5 had been domestic, or those fought with the limited contribution of a foreign power. From the very beginning this was a different kind of war. Japan intended conquest and her express purpose was to destroy China as an independent country. This time, China’s leaders were facing one of the world’s major powers in a full onslaught. And they were facing it alone.

A lot of nonsense has been written about the differences between Chinese and Japanese paths of development since the mid-19th century, which – we are assured – gave Japan all the advantages and China none. Japan got it right, at least as far as power is concerned, it is assumed.

The reality is much more complex, and Japan’s advantages in 1937 were more contingent than received wisdom allows. Chiang had been preparing for war, but his government had done so with one hand tied behind its back, since it always had to contend with other power holders in China (including the communists). As a state, his version of ‘new China’ had been born during a global depression, with the economic weakness which that entailed. And Chiang knew, as did everyone else in the 1930s, that building a powerful army takes time. Japan had been at it since the 1870s; Chiang’s national revolution went back only to 1927.

As Mitter shows, it is also a myth that the outbreak of total war between the two countries in 1937 was the inevitable result of long-term enmities. Relations between China and Japan had been characterised by ups and downs since the late 19th century and in spite of an earlier war there had been at least as much cooperation as conflict.

Literary Review | d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 3 / j a n u a r y 2 0 1 4 10

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