Two trends in particular deserve to be emphasized. First, the process of state-
building that Robert Bedeski discusses (chapter 2) was gradually reducing the
political fragmentation of China that attended the end of the dynastic system in
1912. This trend toward recentralizing power and rebuilding the bases of politi-
cal authority had only partly succeeded by 1937. In fact, piecemeal Japanese
aggression beginning in 1931 presented new challenges to Chiang Kai-shek's
government even as it struggled on various internal fronts to expand its power.
Despite the complexities of Kuomintang intraparty politics and the challenge
represented by disaffected allies, regional militarists, and the Communists, there
is reason to suppose that in the absence of Japanese aggression, the trend toward
internal reunification under Nationalist control would have continued.

Second, recent scholarship has challenged an older view of the Nationalist
period as an era of economic stagnation in which the central government and
numerous regional militarists ("warlords") stymied development by draining the
economy in order to indulge in internecine warfare and to enrich themselves. In
his recent study, Economic Growth in Prewar China, Thomas G. Rawski con-
vincingly demonstrates that on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, Nationalist
China was a successfully developing state with growth patterns very similar to
those of such postwar successful developers as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. ⁵
Contrary to the myth of a rapacious state, all levels of government succeeded in
appropriating less than 10 percent of the Gross Domestic Product--a very low
figure when viewed comparatively. Military expenditures had little impact on the
economy. The state sector was only a small, if growing, part of an economy
dominated by the private sector, in which the market was an effective engine of
development achieving an annual growth rate of approximately 2 percent over a
twenty-year period from World War I until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese
War. ⁶ This was a not inconsiderable achievement in the face of numerous ad-
verse internal and external conditions.

In China, as elsewhere, preparation for war and the management of a wartime
economy vastly increased the state's economic role, a development that in many
cases persisted into the postwar period. ⁷ In his chapter, William Kirby discusses
this phenomenon in China and links it to postwar developments. In economics as
in politics, incidentally, a web of connections ties together the prewar, wartime,
and postwar periods. Paradoxically, a period marked by discontinuities and his-
torical turning points also manifests significant continuities with the past as well
as links to the future.

China's successes in political and economic development under the National-
ist government--partial and uneven as they were--served only to increase the
danger presented by Japanese imperialism. From the first Sino-Japanese War of
1894-95 until its defeat a half-century later in World War II, Japan was the
mortal enemy of Chinese nationalism. Emboldened by their nation's leap to the
status of a world-class industrial and military power, the Meiji-era ( 1868-1912)
oligarchs and their successors embarked on a course of imperial expansion

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