There aren’t many books that can claim, at this late date, to fundamentally transform common American (mis)conceptions of the 20th Century.
Professor Paine’s “The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949” is one of them.
Like many Americans of my generation, I learned in college that the campaigns in Western and Eastern Europe during the Second World War were the truly seminal military events of the 20th Century. These, so I was told, were the titanic, world-altering battles that created the world in which I lived, and would live, for the foreseeable future. The Pacific War, according to this view, began with Pearl Harbor, and ended with a triumphant democratic makeover of archaic Japanese militarism. The Chinese figured in these accounts primarily as helpless, pitiful victims, or incompetent, corrupt sidekicks. The Russians merited a mere footnote for declaring war against Japan at the 11th hour when, presumably, the Americans had already essentially won the war.
"The Wars for Asia" offers a powerful counternarrative, making a very strong case for the global importance of the last century of Asian, particularly Chinese, History, and the serious, even dire, consequences of failing to understand its nature, course and development.
By thoughtfully examining the course of three wars - a (very) long Chinese Civil War, a prolonged regional conflict among Japan, China, and the USSR, and an international struggle for domination involving European powers and America – Professor Paine convincingly demonstrates the inherent interest, enormous scale, and historical significance of military events in Asia. Such a riveting account was made possible only by her truly astonishing breadth of scholarship. Events in Asia have been seriously underreported in English, one suspects, because prior writers lacked her ability to consult original documents in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Russian.
“Wars for Asia” is not, however, a polemical work. It offers a lively recounting of historical events, and a military historian’s deeply informed and wily assessment of the origin, and usually flawed nature, of strategies consciously or unconsciously, rationally or irrationally pursued by all sides.
There is nothing of the dullness or tendentiousness of academic history here. The reader will perhaps develop a grudging respect for that much-maligned warlord of warlords, Chiang Kai-Shek, who probably would have destroyed Mao’s Communist remnants if it hadn’t been for Russian intervention and an ongoing war with several million occupying Japanese (a war in which Mao cannily let his opponent do the heavy lifting). Respect, that is, deeply tinged with horror: Chiang could order the destruction of the dikes holding back the Yellow River in order to stop a Japanese advance, despite the ensuing, predictable deaths of hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants.
The tragedy of Japan – a warrior society forced out of isolation in the 1850’s into a world of imperial rivalry to which it adapted all too well, and the victim of its own success in its wars with China in the 1890’s and with Russia in 1905 – is covered in revealing detail, as is Stalin’s too-clever attempt to initially support both sides of the Chinese Civil War in order to keep his huge southern neighbor divided and weak. The significance of Russian intervention in Manchuria at the end of the war, and its reverse colonialism there - extracting heavy industrial and transportation infrastructure created by the Japanese, rather than building anything of value - receives long-overdue attention. British and American diplomatic and military missteps, stemming from self-interest and ignorance about Asian history and culture, also receive due attention.
.
Korea plays a relatively minor role here: however, Professor Paine’s earlier work, “The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895”, contains a wealth of information about the Hermit Kingdom’s own troubled emergence from isolation in the 1860's at the insistence of a “Big Brotherly” Japan, and the ensuing struggle between China and Japan over control of that strategically (and tragically) placed peninsula.
One key insight Professor Paine employs throughout the book is the critical distinction between the economic motivations of maritime powers, like Great Britain, Japan, and the United States, that benefit from a relatively open global economic system, and continental powers like Russia and China, for whom a geographically defined political and economic system are practically synonymous. This renders continental powers particularly sensitive about borders and territorial control; Russian and Chinese interventionism and expansionism today certainly bears this out.
"The Wars for Asia" is a must read for anyone with an interest in, not just the Asian past, but a complex and troubled global present.
Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Discover the latest buzz-worthy books, from mysteries and romance to humor and nonfiction. Explore more
Frequently bought together
$24.80
Get it as soon as Wednesday, Jul 17
In Stock
Total price:
To see our price, add these items to your cart.
Choose items to buy together.
Similar items that may ship from close to you
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Top reviews from other countries
Alan - UK
The author has researched his topic in great detail and is able to offer both intriguing breadth ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 9, 2015Amazon Customer
If you want to learn about China, Japan, or the Pacific War, start here.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 21, 2018