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The Tragedy of Wuhan, 1938

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Stephen MacKinnon
Stephen MacKinnon
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
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Extract

There is a striking disconnect between the imaginative range of interests which preoccupy historians of World Wars I and II in Europe and North America and the much more narrow political concerns of China historians working on the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45. Since Jacoby and White's Thunder Out of China (1946) and Chalmers Johnson's Peasant Nationalism (1966), Western historiography on the Sino-Japanese War has focused not on the war itself but on the continuing political struggle for supremacy between the Communists and Nationalists. The war is seen as the key to the eventual triumph of the Communists over Chiang Kaishek's Nationalists by 1949. Other issues like the military history of the war itself or its long-term impact on Chinese society and culture have received scant attention.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , October 1996 , pp. 931 - 943
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 The exceptions are issues relating the war to remembrance, in part because of controversies in China and Japan about the holocaust nature of the Nanjing massacre and other Japanese atrocities. See Daqing, Yang in ‘A Sino-Japanese Controversy: The Nanjing Atrocity as History’, Sino-Japanese Studies, 3:1 (11 1990), pp. 14–35;Google ScholarBurma's, IanWages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York, 1994);Google Scholar and Whiting, Allen, China Eyes Japan (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 27–79.Google ScholarHsiung, James C. and Levine, Steven I., edited, China's Bitter Victory: The War with Japan, 1937–45 (Sharpe, 1992) is one of the first studies to evaluate the war on its own terms.Google Scholar

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