Which role did East Asia play in the First World War? How did East Asian commentators see and interpret the »total(izing) war« in Europe and elsewhere? Which lessons did they draw from this experience for their own societies? How did economic networks shift? Which influence did the war have on East Asian visions of world order? This volume aims to introduce new scholarship, in many cases by hitherto untranslated East Asian authors. It is part of a larger movement in current historiography ...

A history of the Chinese experience in WWII, named a Book of the Year by both the Economist and the Financial Times: "Superb" ( The New York Times Book Review).In 1937, two years before Hitler invaded Poland, Chinese troops clashed with Japanese occupiers in the first battle of World War II. Joining with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, China became the fourth great ally in a devastating struggle for its very surviv...

A portrayal of how and why Japan waged war from 1931-1945 and what life was like for the Japanese people in a society engaged in total war.

As the twenty-first century dawns, China stands at a crossroads. The largest and most populous country on earth and currently the world's second biggest economy, China has recently reclaimed its historic place at the center of global affairs after decades of internal chaos and disastrous foreign relations. But even as China tentatively reengages with the outside world, the contradictions of its development risks pushing it back into an era of insularity and instability -- a regression that...

'Chu's smart, iconoclastic portrait dismantles seven misconceptions' [NEW STATESMEN] about modern China and offers a corrective to Western assumptions.THE CHINESE ARE THE MOST HARDWORKING PEOPLE ON EARTH...so why are the younger generation derided as spoiled and lazy?CHINESE PEOPLE DON'T CARE ABOUT POLITICAL FREEDOM...so why is the country's internet exploding with anti-regime dissent?CHINA WILL ONE DAY RULE THE WORLD...so why d...

Over the past 250 years of momentous change and dramatic upheaval, China has proved itself to be a Restless Empire.Tracing China’s course from the eighteenth-century Qing Dynasty to today's People’s Republic, Restless Empire shows how the country’s worldview has evolved. It explains how Chinese attitudes have been determined by both receptiveness and resistance to outside influence and presents the preoccupations that have set its foreign-relations agenda....

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZEThe extraordinary and essential story of how China became the powerful country it is today.**Even at the high noon of Europe's empires China managed to be one of the handful of countries not to succumb. Invaded, humiliated and looted, China nonetheless kept its sovereignty. Robert Bickers' major new book is the first to describe fully what has proved to be one of the modern era's most important stories: the long, often agonisi...

The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949 shows that the Western treatment of World War II, the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War as separate events misrepresents their overlapping connections and causes. The Chinese Civil War precipitated a long regional war between China and Japan that went global in 1941 when the Chinese found themselves fighting a civil war within a regional war within an overarching global war. The global war that consumed Western attentions resulted from Japan's ...

The Japanese experience of war from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century presents a stunning example of the meteoric rise and shattering fall of a great power. As Japan modernized and became the one non-European great power, its leaders concluded that an empire on the Asian mainland required the containment of Russia. Japan won the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) but became overextended in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931–45), which escala...

The fifty months of the Siberian Intervention encompass the existential crisis which affected Japanese at virtually all levels when confronted with the new "world situation" left in the wake of the First World War. From elite politicians and military professionals, to public intellectuals and the families of servicemen in small garrison towns, the intervention was perceived as a test of how Japan might fit itself into the emerging postwar world order. Both domestically and internationally ...

When the world held its breath It is more than 25 years since the end of the Cold War. It began over 75 years ago, in 1944 long before the last shots of the Second World War had echoed across the wastelands of Eastern Europe with the brutal Greek Civil War. The battle lines are no longer drawn, but they linger on, unwittingly or not, in conflict zones such as Syria, Somalia and Ukraine. In an era of mass-produced AK-47s and ICBMs, one such flashpoint was China in 1949 China. 1949: two vast...

"A lucid history of the rise and fall of militarism in Japan…" —New York Journal of BooksJapan at War in the Pacific recounts the dramatic story of Japan's transformation from a Samurai-led feudal society to a modern military-industrial empire in the space of a few decades—and the many wars it fought along the way. These culminated in an attempt by Japan's military leaders to create an Asia-Pacific empire which at its greatest extent rivaled the B...