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The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949
£19.80
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 peripheral strategy to cut foreign aid to China by attacking Pearl Harbour and Western interests throughout the Pacific in 1941. S. C. M. Paine emphasizes the fears and ambitions of Japan, China and Russia, and the pivotal decisions that set them on a collision course in the 1920s and 1930s. The resulting wars together yielded a viscerally anti-Japanese and unified Communist China, the still-angry rising power of the early twenty-first century.
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by Alan – UK
This is a fabulous book. It not only sheds light on a poorly covered aspect of WW2, but succeeds in putting almost half a century of world changing regional history into context. The author has researched his topic in great detail and is able to offer both intriguing breadth and depth. Breadth: I now understood, really for the first time, the massive panorama of history which was playing out in this under-reported corner of the globe in the first half of the 20th century; Depth: This was a hugely complex stage, three nested wars, with each player driving towards their own, mutually exclusive, end. As though to fully make the case for the global importance of this theatre of war in the first half of the last century, the author often plunges into the What ifs…. He does this in such an intelligent logically deductive manner, that for the first time I was really able to grasp, what had with unavoidable hindsight, has always eluded me, that is just how very uncertain and frightening the outcome of WW2 really was and how the seemingly inconsequential events of the far off and so very long Chinese civil war, might just have shaped our world so differently.
This is a must read.
by Amazon Customer
For an understanding of the foundation of Chinese attitude towards the West today, this book is invaluable. Written by a historian who knows his subject well, it will fill in the gaps contemporary narrative leaves when trying to explain this complex region. As a student who took one of his other books to the battlefields of the Russo-Japanese war and hiked the hills around Dalian and Port Arthur, he provided the ‘meat’ for me to appreciate my personal experiences. Locals were shocked an Englishman was climbing the hills who knew so much of their history and where to go. That is thanks to Dr. Paine.
by Amazon Customer
Excellent book!