Building a Nation at War argues that the Chinese Nationalist government’s retreat inland during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), its consequent need for inland resources, and its participation in new scientific and technical relationships with the United States led to fundamental changes in how the Nationalists engaged with science and technology as tools to promote development.

The war catalyzed an emphasis on applied sciences, comprehensive economic planning, and development of scientific and technical human resources—all of which served the Nationalists’ immediate and long-term goals. It created an opportunity for the Nationalists to extend control over inland China and over education and industry. It also provided opportunities for China to mobilize transnational networks of Chinese-Americans, Chinese in America, and the American government and businesses. These groups provided technical advice, ran training programs, and helped the Nationalists acquire manufactured goods and tools. J. Megan Greene shows how the Nationalists worked these programs to their advantage, even in situations where their American counterparts clearly had the upper hand. Finally, this book shows how, although American advisers and diplomats criticized China for harboring resources rather than putting them into winning the war against Japan, US industrial consultants were also strongly motivated by postwar goals.

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.

When Japan invaded China in the summer of 1937, many Chinese journalists greeted the news with euphoria. For years, the Chinese press had urged Chiang Kai-shek to resist Tokyo’s aggressive overtures. This was the war they wanted, convinced that their countrymen would triumph.

Parks Coble recaptures the experiences of China’s war correspondents during the Sino–Japanese War of 1937–1945. He delves into the wartime writing of reporters connected with the National Salvation Movement—journalists such as Fan Changjiang, Jin Zhonghua, and Zou Taofen—who believed their mission was to inspire the masses through patriotic reporting. As the Japanese army moved from one stunning victory to the next, forcing Chiang’s government to retreat to the interior, newspaper reports often masked the extent of China’s defeats. Atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing were played down in the press for fear of undercutting national morale.

By 1941, as political cohesion in China melted away, Chiang cracked down on leftist intellectuals, including journalists, many of whom fled to the Communist-held areas of the north. When the People’s Republic was established in 1949, some of these journalists were elevated to prominent positions. But in a bitter twist, all mention of their wartime writings disappeared. Mao Zedong emphasized the heroism of his own Communist Revolution, not the war effort led by his archrival Chiang. Denounced as enemies during the Cultural Revolution, once-prominent wartime journalists, including Fan, committed suicide. Only with the revival of Chinese nationalism in the reform era has their legacy been resurrected.

What does the Chinese Communist Revolution teach us about the relationship between political discourse and real experiences and events? This unique interpretation of the revolutionary process in China uses empirical evidence as well as concepts from contemporary cultural studies to probe this significant question. David Apter and Tony Saich base their analysis on recently available primary sources on party history, English- and Chinese-language accounts of the Long March and Yan’an period, and interviews with veterans and their relatives.

Written by an eminent political theorist well seasoned in comparative development and an internationally recognized China scholar, and abounding in new approaches to central issues, this incisive analysis will be welcomed by social theorists and China scholars alike.