North China at War: The Social Ecology of Revolution, 19371945

(Hardback)

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Description

This groundbreaking volume draws on newly available documentary sources to explore key facets of the move to power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the War of Resistance to Japan from 1937 to 1945. Leading scholars from China and the West compare the varied experiences of the CCP-and its interactions with local society-in all the border regions and base areas of resistance to the Japanese invasion on the North China battlefront. Eschewing grand theory, the authors develop a social ecology of revolutionO that traces the relationship between local conditions and patterns of social and political change.

Reviews

Collected together the papers provide an excellent example of the range of analyses demanded by the complexity of the modern Chinese historical experience. * War in History *
This would be an effective introductory reading for graduate classes. * The China Journal *
[T]his very useful and enlightening volume, which, helpfully focused by the methodological reflections in its introduction and conclusion, enables a greater insight and understanding of the complex social diversity at work in the revolutionary process. It was not without difficulties and setbacks that this process finally led to the defeat of the Japanese and the ultimate victory of the CCP. It is all the more useful to turn back to these issues, because since the 1980s a plethora of CCP documents, personal memoirs, and works by Chinese historians on the Sino-Japanese war period have been published that tend to obscure them, or even conceal them completely. * China Perspectives *

Author Bio

Feng Chongyi is head of Chinese studies at the Institute for International Studies, University of Technology, Sydney. David S. G. Goodman is director of the Institute for International Studies, University of Technology.