present-day Japanese youths are asking whether Nanking was really raped. ⁵

It is not surprising that historians, lacking uninhibited access to archives that
the principal parties still jealously guard from impartial scrutiny, have not yet
been able to produce authoritative assessments of the Sino-Japanese War. In
undertaking this book, our collective purpose has been the modest objective of
making a start at reviewing the tragedy of the Sino-Japanese War within its
overall historical context. For that purpose, the co-editors assembled a team of
scholars, all of whom are well-established authorities in their fields. Each of
these scholars enjoys a well-deserved reputation for independent and unbiased
work. Together they address a cross-section of important topics relating to war-
time China during 1937-45.

What we have produced is not a rehashed short history of the war that merely
chronicles the military conflict. ⁶ Rather, ours is a book about China itself--the
political, diplomatic, military, economic, and cultural dimensions of an eight-
year struggle that China did not seek in the first place and that it was initially not
prepared to fight. While other accounts cover only certain aspects of the war,
such as military battles or the human suffering, our volume takes a holistic
approach to the question of how the country responded to the impact of war.
Other books focus only on certain subperiods, but ours covers the war in its
entirety. As such, to the best of our knowledge, there is no other volume like
ours.

A bit of the inside history of this project may be in order. At the outset of our
endeavor, in my capacity as co-editor, I negotiated in earnest with authorities in
Taipei to secure unprecedented access for the book's contributors to the archives
in the holdings of the Kuomintang Party History Commission (Tang Shih Hui),
the government's National Archives Agency (Kuo Shih Kuan) and the Military
History Bureau (Shih Cheng Chu) of the Ministry of National Defense. After
initial approval had been granted, one of the principal negotiators in Taipei, who
happened to be the key "gatekeeper" to the archives, unexpectedly took objec-
tion to the makeup of our team of scholars. In particular, he demanded the
removal of two contributors who, in his opinion, were too "uncontrollable"
(meaning not pro-KMT). We categorically rejected this unacceptable demand,
preferring to sacrifice the privilege of archival access rather than to compromise
the academic independence and integrity of our team. This stance eventually cost
us our privilege of access to the Taiwan archives. Our co-authors, therefore, had
to resort largely to their personal research files and to sources available in the
West, plus additional archival materials in the PRC made available, on a case-
by-case basis, through the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Pe-
king, under a special agreement negotiated on behalf of the project.

Thus, if critics should take us to task for not having availed ourselves in all
cases of the wealth of archival sources in Taipei, or for having relied too heavily
on Western and Chinese Communist sources, our response--contrary to the
convention observed in most scholarly works--is that the fault lies not with us

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