Военная история / China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China

Название: China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China
Автор(ы): Hans van de Ven
Издательство: Harvard University Press
Год: 2018
ISBN: 0674983505
Страниц: 385
Язык: English
Формат: True PDF
Размер: 55 MB

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.