tial growth enabling the Chinese Communist movement to become for the first
time in its history a serious contender for national power. At the same time, the
war fatally sapped the energies of the Chinese Nationalist government, whose
defeat in the civil war of 1946-49 cannot be explained without reference to the
antecedent experience of the Sino-Japanese War. ⁴ And if this were not enough,
as James C. Hsiung spells out in the concluding chapter of this volume, the war
itself and its aftermath facilitated a major transformation of the international
system in ways that continue to affect us all.

This introductory chapter has several purposes. First, it provides some back-
ground information in order to place the Sino-Japanese War in its historical
context. The focus of this volume is deliberately on China, not Japan, but a brief
discussion of Japanese interests and policies may nevertheless be in order. Sec-
ond, it relates the Sino-Japanese War to the broader context of World War II of
which it is indeed an important part. Most of the issues arising in China during
the course of the Sino-Japanese War find their analogues in the experience of
other nations during World War II. The experience of the war provides a rich and
as yet scarcely tapped vein of material for comparative historical studies. Third,
this chapter introduces some of the major issues that the rest of the chapters
explore in detail, and it explains the organization of the volume as a whole.

There is abundant evidence for the proposition that the Sino-Japanese War
was a major turning point in the history of modern China. But what were the
major trends in China on the eve of the outbreak of war in mid-1937? Which
were disrupted and which were accelerated by the war? Without the need to
confront Japanese aggression, would the Nationalist government have been able
to consolidate and expand its political control and to guide the process of devel-
opment? Or would deep-seated socioeconomic problems, particularly in the
countryside, eventually have swept the Chinese Communists, or some other
revolutionary force, into power?

Needless to say, no scholarly consensus exists concerning any of these ques-
tions, particularly those of the historical "what might have been" variety. It is
worth noting, however, that over the last decade or two our understanding of
Republican China, including in particular the Nanking decade of 1927-37, has
gradually deepened. The post-World War II experience of numerous Third
World countries suggests that the problems that the Nationalist government grap-
pled with were by no means unique to China. They differed in particulars and
scale rather than in kind from those faced by many other developing states.
Second, seen in comparative perspective, the record of the Nationalist govern-
ment looks better in retrospect than it did at the time and for many years after-
ward. The view held by many liberal Western scholars, who were inclined to
dismiss the Nationalists as ineffectual, dictatorial, and repressive, doubtless cap-
tured some of the reality of the Nationalist regime, but there was more to it than
that.

-xviii-