Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 by Rana Mitter

Occupied Shanghai (Stanford, CA, 1993). Jonathan Spence’s The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895–1980 (New York, 1981) brings to life the journeys of artistic figures who spent time in Yan’an during the war. John Israel’s Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution (Stanford, CA, 1998) focuses on the difficult lives of intellectuals who made the journey to the Nationalist areas of China.
     
    SOCIAL HISTORY
     
    The social history of wartime China is developing strongly as new sources open up. Aside from work on the Communist areas (discussed above), there is stimulating new work on social change in the Nationalist zones. A pioneering work on labor history in wartime Chongqing is Joshua H. Howard, Workers at War: Labor in China’s Arsenals, 1937–1953 (Stanford, CA, 2004). Gender issues are addressed in Danke Li, Echoes of Chongqing: Women in Wartime China (Chicago, 2009) and Nicole Huang, Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s (Leiden, 2005). Essays in the following two special journal issues also deal with aspects of China’s wartime social and economic history: Modern Asian Studies 45:1 (March 2011), special edition “China in World War II, 1937–1945,” ed. Rana Mitter and Aaron William Moore; and European Journal of East Asian Studies 11:2 (December 2012) special edition “Welfare, Relief, and Rehabilitation in Wartime China,” ed. Rana Mitter and Helen Schneider.
    One important subfield of wartime social history is the new history of refugee flight in China. Important work includes Stephen R. MacKinnon, Wuhan 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (Berkeley, CA, 2008), and R. Keith Schoppa, In a Sea of Bitterness: Refugees during the Sino-Japanese War (Cambridge, MA, 2011). A powerful social history of wartime Chinese experience that engages with refugee experience is Diana Lary, The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937–1945 (Cambridge, 2010). A fascinating study of the links between ecological change and refugee flight is Micah S. Muscolino, “Refugees, Land Reclamation, and Militarized Landscapes in Wartime China: Huanglongshan, Shaanxi, 1937–1945,” Journal of Asian Studies 69:2 (2010).
     
    LEGACY
     
    The legacy of the conflict between China and Japan has been explored in a variety of studies. James Reilly’s Strong Society, Smart State: The Rise of Public Opinion in China’s Japan Policy (New York, 2011) and Peter Hays Gries’s China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy (Berkeley, CA, 2004) give insights into the links between memory of wartime and contemporary international relations. Caroline Rose’s Sino-Japanese Relations: Facing the Past, Looking to the Future? (London, 2004) and Interpreting History in Sino-Japanese Relations (London, 1998) give valuable insights into the relevance of the “history debates” between the two sides in the present day. Yinan He’s The Search for Reconciliation: Sino-Japanese and German-Polish Relations since World War II (Cambridge, 2009) gives a welcome comparative perspective. War and memory in China and in the region more widely is addressed in Sheila Jager and Rana Mitter, eds., War, Memory, and the Post–Cold War in Asia (Cambridge, MA, 2007).

Acknowledgments
    I have been privileged to work with not one but several inspiring and rigorous editors. At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Amanda Cook took charge of the book through most of its life. Amanda was simultaneously unfailingly supportive and absolutely insistent on making sure the manuscript was revised as many times as it took to make it right. Her contribution to the final version is immeasurable. In the last few months before completion, I benefited from meticulous editing by Ben Hyman and generous and thoughtful input from Bruce Nichols. At Penguin, I had the brilliant input of Simon Winder, who provided the rather terrifying advantage of being an editor who