China S Wars

Chinese leaders once tried to suppress memories of their nation’s brutal experience during World War II. Now they celebrate the “victory”—a key foundation of China’s rising nationalism. For most of its history, the People’s Republic of China discouraged public discussion of the war against Japan. It was an experience of victimization—and one that saw Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek fighting for the same goals. But now, as China grows more powerful, the meaning of the war is changing. Rana Mitter argues that China’s reassessment of the war years is central to its newfound confidence abroad and to mounting nationalism at home. China’s Good War begins with the academics who shepherded the once-taboo subject into wider discourse. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, they researched the Guomindang war effort, collaboration with the Japanese, and China’s role in forming the post-1945 global order. But interest in the war would not stay confined to scholarly journals. Today public sites of memory—including museums, movies and television shows, street art, popular writing, and social media—define the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China. Wartime China emerges as victor rather than victim. The shifting story has nurtured a number of new views. One rehabilitates Chiang Kai-shek’s war efforts, minimizing the bloody conflicts between him and Mao and aiming to heal the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. Another narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order that emerged from the war—an order, China argues, under threat today largely from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its collective memory of the war has created a new foundation for a people destined to shape the world.

China is one of the great powers of the modern world. Yet in the late 19th century China was a ramshackle and isolated medieval empire upon whom the European colonial powers could impose their wishes at will. China's Wars describes the series of conflicts from 1894 to 1949 that forged modern China, from colonial clashes such as the Boxer Rebellion, through the chaotic years of warlord domination to the Japanese invasion, the Second World War and the bitter Civil War that followed. Previously unpublished photographs, contemporary pictures and specially-commissioned maps illustrate these tumultuous events and the men who fought them, events that would end with the eventual triumph of the Communist Party and the rise of modern China.

For years, China has served as the "factory floor" for global production, driving down prices for consumers worldwide. But, unfortunately, China's rapid and chaotic industrialization has put it on a collision course with the rest of the world. The Coming China Wars was the first book to systematically cover all those conflicts: political, economic, and environmental. Now, in this new edition, Dr. Peter Navarro has thoroughly updated the entire book. You'll find new chapters on the danger posed by China's flood of defective products and contaminated food; China's dramatic military expansion and the rising threat of a "hot war"; China's space program and its profound strategic implications; China's growing suppression of human rights and free speech; and much more. The coming China Wars will be fought over everything from decent jobs, livable wages, and advanced technologies to strategic resources...and eventually to our most basic of all needs: bread, water, and air. Unless all nations immediately address these impending conflicts, the results may be catastrophic. Like the First Edition, this book demands that we think much more deeply about how to stop the coming China Wars, laying out hard choices that must be made sooner rather than later. This new edition offers even more policy recommendations, including original contributions from several of the world's most important China experts.

A history of capitalism in nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century China and India that explores the competition between their tea industries “Tea War is not only a detailed comparative history of the transformation of tea production in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it also intervenes in larger debates about the nature of capitalism, global modernity, and global history.”— Alexander F. Day, Occidental College Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.

China's breakneck industrialization is placing it on a collision course with the entire world. Tomorrow's China Wars will be fought over everything from decent jobs, livable wages, and leading-edge technologies to strategic resources such as oil, copper, and steel--even food, water, and air. Economist Navarro previews all these potential conflicts, and reveals the urgent, radical decisions that must be made to avoid catastrophe. China's thirst for oil is driving nuclear proliferation in Iran, genocide in the Sudan, even Japan's remilitarization. Navarro reveals China's shocking role in the drug trade and how its flesh trade may help trigger tomorrow's worst AIDS crisis; how China has become the world's most ruthless imperialist, how it is promoting global environmental disaster, and, perhaps most terrifying of all, how this nuclear superpower and pirate nation may be spiraling toward internal chaos.--From publisher description.

The history of China is a history of warfare. Rarely in its 3,000-year existence has the country not been beset by war, rebellion, or raids. Warfare was a primary source of innovation, social evolution, and material progress in the Legendary Era, Hsia dynasty, and Shang dynasty--indeed, war was the force that formed the first cohesive Chinese empire, setting China on a trajectory of state building and aggressive activity that continues to this day. In Ancient Chinese Warfare, a preeminent expert on Chinese military history uses recently recovered documents and archaeological findings to construct a comprehensive guide to the developing technologies, strategies, and logistics of ancient Chinese militarism. The result is a definitive look at the tools and methods that won wars and shaped culture in ancient China.

Throughout its modern history China has suffered from immense destruction and loss of life from warfare. In its worst periods of warfare, the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), millions of civilians lost their lives. But in China, the story of modern war-related death and suffering has remained hidden. The Rape of Nanking is beginning to be known, but hundreds of other massacres are still unrecognized by the outside world and even by China itself. The focus of Scars of War is the social and psychological, not the economic, costs of war on the country. The book is illustrated with contemporary photographs and woodblock prints. Each chapter is introduced by a traditional Chinese saying (cheng-yu) on warfare.

China’s mid-twentieth-century wars pose extraordinary interpretive challenges. The issue is not just that the Chinese fought for such a long time—from the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 1937 until the close of the Korean War in 1953—across such vast territory. As Hans van de Ven explains, the greatest puzzles lie in understanding China’s simultaneous external and internal wars. Much is at stake, politically, in how this story is told. Today in its official history and public commemorations, the People’s Republic asserts Chinese unity against Japan during World War II. But this overwrites the era’s stark divisions between Communists and Nationalists, increasingly erasing the civil war from memory. Van de Ven argues that the war with Japan, the civil war, and its aftermath were in fact of a piece—a singular process of conflict and political change. Reintegrating the Communist uprising with the Sino-Japanese War, he shows how the Communists took advantage of wartime to increase their appeal, how fissures between the Nationalists and Communists affected anti-Japanese resistance, and how the fractious coalition fostered conditions for revolution. In the process, the Chinese invented an influential paradigm of war, wherein the Clausewitzian model of total war between well-defined interstate enemies gave way to murky campaigns of national liberation involving diverse domestic and outside belligerents. This history disappears when the realities of China’s mid-century conflicts are stripped from public view. China at War recovers them.