New Approaches to Asian History, 13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xii, 283 pp. (Figures, maps, tables.) US$29.99, paper. ISBN 978-1-107-67826-2.
French novelist Victor Hugo once wrote that “foreign war is a scratch on the arm; a civil war is an ulcer which devours the vitals of a nation.” The Chinese Civil War (1927–1949)—technically ongoing since the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan) never signed an official armistice—is no exception to this characterization of civil strife as an instrument of life-shattering trauma. Historians know well that the conflict split China along ideological lines, with millions of Communist and Nationalist soldiers and countless millions of civilians perishing throughout the duration of hostilities, and millions more evacuating the Mainland to Taiwan to escape the victorious Chinese Communists. But lost in the war’s underscoring of the ideological divide between Mainland China and Taiwan and postwar interpretations of the war on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are the people who suffered through war themselves.
Contrary to ideologically tempered interpretations of the 1945–1949 period of the Chinese Civil War, however, China’s Civil War: A Social History, 1945–1949 by Diana Lary (professor emeritus, University of British Columbia) moves beyond existing Marxist and postmodern theoretical approaches to interpret it through the lens of trauma theory. Like her previous Scars of War (ed. with Stephen MacKinnon), The Chinese People at War, and China at War (ed. with Ezra Vogel and MacKinnon), military history interweaves with social history to frame a picture of the lives of people during and after violent conflict. Lary uses biographies, memoirs, illustrations, and oral histories to accomplish this end, thereby highlighting the “painful and divisive social impacts of the war” (12) to give voices to those who either experienced China’s Civil War firsthand or felt its reverberations through familial ties.
The book consists of eight chapters that cover the war in chronological fashion, from its social background in the opening chapter to the immediate and social outcomes in the 1950s. Lary sets the first few chapters against a backdrop of Guomindang (GMD) instability and Chinese Communist regrouping in China’s countryside after 1927. Chapter 1 examines elite upheaval, social polarization, and the psycho-social effects that war with Japan caused, while the second chapter analyzes the transition from the Second Sino-Japanese War into all-out civil strife between Communist and GMD belligerents, during which, as Lary states, the “re-establishment of political order in China was fragile” (38). The author argues in chapter 3 that despite the GMD’s control of China, several turning points account partially for a spike in support for the Communists and shifted momentum into their camp, such as a disunited GMD’s failed efforts to recoup lands that they lost previously, economic turmoil, and its total ignorance of winning hearts and minds. The next few chapters, meanwhile, trace the Communists’ gradual rise from rural nuisance to tactical aggressor. The fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters discuss the escalation of the conflict, leading up to the eleven months of the Communists’ rout of GMD forces as it moved to take Beijing by 1949. Chapters 7 and 8 examine outcomes of the war during the 1950s, such as the victorious Communists’ entrenchment of class differences, generational splits as youth took primacy in Communist China over parents and adults, and in contrast to earlier periods, a promise to improve the status of women. The concluding chapter provides an exposé into postwar reverberations, namely isolation, cross-Taiwan Strait interpretations/re-interpretations of the conflict, and memories of the war.
Overall, the book satisfies as a long-overdue investigation of the immediate post-WWII period of the Chinese Civil War without the ideological or nationalist overtones that have characterized previous efforts, yet some issues do detract from an otherwise excellent study. Lary’s inclusion of succinct biographical snapshots—from last Emperor Pu Yi, acclaimed author Jiang Bingzhi (Ding Ling), to best-selling novelist and journalist Louis Cha and famed director Ang Lee—succeeds in connecting peoples’ stories to the larger analysis of the Chinese Civil War. Her decision to incorporate them only in short form instead of granting them chapter-length focus, however, is disappointing, and at times this causes distraction from the larger point that the author endeavours to make. Also offsetting is Lary’s invocation of Chalmers Johnson’s somewhat dated mono-causal explanation for the spread of nationalism in China to rural areas. Lary states that Johnson “argues persuasively that the alliance between Party and peasantry in the resistance to Japan brought nationalism to the villages, taught peasants to understand how oppressed they were under the old order and gave them a sense of belonging to a nation” (8). However, recent scholarship based on Communist Party documents, classified GMD intelligence reportage, and local archives reveals otherwise. Chen Yungfa’s local historical approach, for instance, highlights issues of tax evasion, army desertion, the Party’s countermeasures, corvée service, and soldier enlistment campaigns, to demonstrate that to overcome the peasant tradition of resisting state requirements the Communists’ required more than patriotic appeals to mobilize peasants. Prasenjit Duara, in the same vein, argues that Qing state modernizing initiatives attacked local religion and lineage structures, thereby empowering entrepreneurial brokers, and unseating rural gentry to create a cultural nexus of power vacuum that remained unfilled until the Communists established rural bases. Therefore, the Communists’ exploitation of several cleavages, not merely homages to a detached and ethereal nationalism, explains more fully the phenomenon of peasant mobilization against the Japanese occupiers.
Such issues notwithstanding, China’s Civil War is a thoughtful and well-composed volume that breaks the mould of telling military history by placing valuable insight on the social dimensions of civil strife. Diana Lary’s interweaving of accounts of the war with people’s lives illustrates the conflict’s pervasiveness across several social strata in Chinese society, reminding us that countless numbers of everyday Chinese endured significant hardship in wartime, and even thereafter, in both Chinas, many more still seek to sew the broken pieces of their lives back together.
Matt Galway
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 421-423