but somewhere else. This is why we feel constrained to share the above informa-
tion with the reader. We tried our best, but failed in our bid for access simply
because we refused to surrender our intellectual honesty and integrity.

Despite this disappointment, we believe that we have accomplished what we
set out to achieve--a one-volume account of China during the war years of
1937-45 that provides the reader with a concise but comprehensive and informa-
tive account of the Chinese holocaust. Our only remaining regret is that the
pressure of other obligations led to the voluntary withdrawal of one of our
original contributors and thus deprived us of a chapter on wartime social condi-
tions that he had originally intended to write. This missing chapter was supposed
to have provided us with an analysis, among other things, of the sweat and tears
of ordinary Chinese people, of the bloodshed, sorrows, and tribulations that the
war had inflicted upon the Chinese people as a whole. ⁷

It remains to be said that our ultimate purpose in presenting this broad review
of a too often forgotten tragedy is not to contribute to a spirit of retribution for
the historical misdeeds of the past. It is, rather, to offer hope that we can all gain
some wisdom from a careful scrutiny of history, and that through such an effort
the tragedy of the Sino-Japanese War, no less than that of World War II in its
entirety, shall never be repeated.

In addition to the co-authors whose names appear in these pages, a number of
other persons have been helpful in giving us advice and encouragement in the
preparation of this book. Space permits us only to mention briefly the following
persons: Professors Samuel Chu of Ohio State University, Winberg Chai of the
University of Wyoming, Shao-chuan Leng of the University of Virginia, T. K.
Tong of the City College of New York, and C. Martin Wilbur of Columbia
University. During the early stages of the book project, the co-editors were ably
assisted by Yang-shan Chou and Patricia Lane. A grant from the Contemporary
U.S.-Asia Research Institute helped to defray all incidental expenses, including
those for a planning conference held in late 1985 in New York, during which the
research strategy for the book and the division of labor among its co-authors
were discussed and decided.

A word about romanization is in order. Because the time frame of the book
predates the introduction of the pinyin system, we have chosen to use the Wade-
Giles system of romanizing Chinese words with only two modifications: (a)
Well-known post-office place names like Chungking or Canton are used in their
familiar spellings; (b) Where idiosyncratic spellings for certain personal names,
such as T. V. Soong and Chiang Kai-shek, were in use at the time, we use these
spellings instead of their proper Wade-Giles transliterations. One problem is
presented by Chinese Communist names in publications from the PRC subse-
quent to January 1, 1979. In these instances, we use the pinyin spelling followed
in parentheses by its Wade-Giles equivalent the first time the name appears, e.g.,
"Zhu De (Chu Te)." For the convenience of readers, a separate Wade-Giles-
pinyin conversion table is provided.

-xi-