The wars for Asia, 1911-1949
By: S.C.M. Paine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9781107020696
Subjects: Military History; HISTORY / Military / General; Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945; World War, 1939-1945; History
Description: "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 long 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 Harbor and Western interests throughout the Pacific on December 7-8, 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 - the Chinese Civil War (1911-1949), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931-1945), and World War II (1939-1945) - together yielded a viscerally anti-Japanese and unified Communist China, the still-angry rising power of the early twenty-first century. While these events are history in the West, they live on in Japan and especially China"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Part I. Fear and Ambition: Japan, China, and Russia: 1. Introduction: the Asian roots of World War II; 2. Japan 1931-6: the containment of Russia and national restoration; 3. China 1926-36: chaos and the quest for the mandate of heaven; 4. Russia 1917-36: impending two-front war and world revolution; Part II. Nested Wars: A Civil War within a Regional War within a Global War: 5. Flashback to 1911 and the beginning of the long Chinese Civil War; 6. The regional war: the Second Sino-Japanese War; 7. The global war: World War I; 8. The final act of the long Chinese Civil War; 9. Conclusion: civil war as the prologue and epilogue to regional and global wars.