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desertcart.com: The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949: 9781107697478: Paine, S. C. M.: Books Review: A Rich, Profound and Transformative Work - There aren’t many books that can claim, at this late date, to fundamentally transform common American (mis)conceptions of the 20th Century. Professor Paine’s “The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949” is one of them. Like many Americans of my generation, I learned in college that the campaigns in Western and Eastern Europe during the Second World War were the truly seminal military events of the 20th Century. These, so I was told, were the titanic, world-altering battles that created the world in which I lived, and would live, for the foreseeable future. The Pacific War, according to this view, began with Pearl Harbor, and ended with a triumphant democratic makeover of archaic Japanese militarism. The Chinese figured in these accounts primarily as helpless, pitiful victims, or incompetent, corrupt sidekicks. The Russians merited a mere footnote for declaring war against Japan at the 11th hour when, presumably, the Americans had already essentially won the war. "The Wars for Asia" offers a powerful counternarrative, making a very strong case for the global importance of the last century of Asian, particularly Chinese, History, and the serious, even dire, consequences of failing to understand its nature, course and development. By thoughtfully examining the course of three wars - a (very) long Chinese Civil War, a prolonged regional conflict among Japan, China, and the USSR, and an international struggle for domination involving European powers and America – Professor Paine convincingly demonstrates the inherent interest, enormous scale, and historical significance of military events in Asia. Such a riveting account was made possible only by her truly astonishing breadth of scholarship. Events in Asia have been seriously underreported in English, one suspects, because prior writers lacked her ability to consult original documents in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Russian. “Wars for Asia” is not, however, a polemical work. It offers a lively recounting of historical events, and a military historian’s deeply informed and wily assessment of the origin, and usually flawed nature, of strategies consciously or unconsciously, rationally or irrationally pursued by all sides. There is nothing of the dullness or tendentiousness of academic history here. The reader will perhaps develop a grudging respect for that much-maligned warlord of warlords, Chiang Kai-Shek, who probably would have destroyed Mao’s Communist remnants if it hadn’t been for Russian intervention and an ongoing war with several million occupying Japanese (a war in which Mao cannily let his opponent do the heavy lifting). Respect, that is, deeply tinged with horror: Chiang could order the destruction of the dikes holding back the Yellow River in order to stop a Japanese advance, despite the ensuing, predictable deaths of hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants. The tragedy of Japan – a warrior society forced out of isolation in the 1850’s into a world of imperial rivalry to which it adapted all too well, and the victim of its own success in its wars with China in the 1890’s and with Russia in 1905 – is covered in revealing detail, as is Stalin’s too-clever attempt to initially support both sides of the Chinese Civil War in order to keep his huge southern neighbor divided and weak. The significance of Russian intervention in Manchuria at the end of the war, and its reverse colonialism there - extracting heavy industrial and transportation infrastructure created by the Japanese, rather than building anything of value - receives long-overdue attention. British and American diplomatic and military missteps, stemming from self-interest and ignorance about Asian history and culture, also receive due attention. . Korea plays a relatively minor role here: however, Professor Paine’s earlier work, “The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895”, contains a wealth of information about the Hermit Kingdom’s own troubled emergence from isolation in the 1860's at the insistence of a “Big Brotherly” Japan, and the ensuing struggle between China and Japan over control of that strategically (and tragically) placed peninsula. One key insight Professor Paine employs throughout the book is the critical distinction between the economic motivations of maritime powers, like Great Britain, Japan, and the United States, that benefit from a relatively open global economic system, and continental powers like Russia and China, for whom a geographically defined political and economic system are practically synonymous. This renders continental powers particularly sensitive about borders and territorial control; Russian and Chinese interventionism and expansionism today certainly bears this out. "The Wars for Asia" is a must read for anyone with an interest in, not just the Asian past, but a complex and troubled global present. Review: Masterful synthesis, bursting with insights - Broadly speaking, this is a military history of Northeast Asia in the first half of the 20th century, with China as the necessary center of gravity. In a narrower sense, however, this is really a book about China's 14-year struggle with Japan before and during World War II, with a lengthy prologue about events in the period until 1931, and a shorter epilogue about the civil war that devoured China from 1945 to 1949. Whether one decides to read this book one way or the other, it's a revelation. Virtually every page has a striking insight. To take one example, it has the clearest explanation of the 1936 Xian Incident, its political context and strategic consequences that I have read anywhere. To fully appreciate The Wars for Asia it probably helps to already know something about East Asian history, but I believe even "new readers" will benefit tremendously from this masterful work. What one gets from this book is, in essence, an intelligent synthesis of recent research into the period, seen through the prism of Dr Paine's sharp analytical mind. The array of sources cited in the text is staggering. The author has digested all the relevant literature in English, in addition to a huge literature of more marginal relevance. On top of this comes familiarity with a vast amount of research published in Chinese, Japanese and even Russian. The result is a story that is comprehensive in the best sense of the word. The author is a professor at the US Naval War College, and in a few places the book reads a bit like expanded lecture notes - but in a good way. It has the wry humor that experienced university teachers adopt to keep their students' attention, and in works well in written form as well, to make this not just an educational but also an entertaining read. I don't know Dr Paine's other book on East Asian history, an account of the First Sino-Japanese War in the late 19th century, but it's next on my reading list!
| Best Sellers Rank | #56,769 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #41 in Japanese History (Books) #53 in Chinese History (Books) #936 in Military History (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars (209) |
| Dimensions | 6 x 1.26 x 9 inches |
| Edition | Reprint |
| ISBN-10 | 1107697476 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1107697478 |
| Item Weight | 1.5 pounds |
| Language | English |
| Print length | 504 pages |
| Publication date | October 9, 2014 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
R**R
A Rich, Profound and Transformative Work
There aren’t many books that can claim, at this late date, to fundamentally transform common American (mis)conceptions of the 20th Century. Professor Paine’s “The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949” is one of them. Like many Americans of my generation, I learned in college that the campaigns in Western and Eastern Europe during the Second World War were the truly seminal military events of the 20th Century. These, so I was told, were the titanic, world-altering battles that created the world in which I lived, and would live, for the foreseeable future. The Pacific War, according to this view, began with Pearl Harbor, and ended with a triumphant democratic makeover of archaic Japanese militarism. The Chinese figured in these accounts primarily as helpless, pitiful victims, or incompetent, corrupt sidekicks. The Russians merited a mere footnote for declaring war against Japan at the 11th hour when, presumably, the Americans had already essentially won the war. "The Wars for Asia" offers a powerful counternarrative, making a very strong case for the global importance of the last century of Asian, particularly Chinese, History, and the serious, even dire, consequences of failing to understand its nature, course and development. By thoughtfully examining the course of three wars - a (very) long Chinese Civil War, a prolonged regional conflict among Japan, China, and the USSR, and an international struggle for domination involving European powers and America – Professor Paine convincingly demonstrates the inherent interest, enormous scale, and historical significance of military events in Asia. Such a riveting account was made possible only by her truly astonishing breadth of scholarship. Events in Asia have been seriously underreported in English, one suspects, because prior writers lacked her ability to consult original documents in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Russian. “Wars for Asia” is not, however, a polemical work. It offers a lively recounting of historical events, and a military historian’s deeply informed and wily assessment of the origin, and usually flawed nature, of strategies consciously or unconsciously, rationally or irrationally pursued by all sides. There is nothing of the dullness or tendentiousness of academic history here. The reader will perhaps develop a grudging respect for that much-maligned warlord of warlords, Chiang Kai-Shek, who probably would have destroyed Mao’s Communist remnants if it hadn’t been for Russian intervention and an ongoing war with several million occupying Japanese (a war in which Mao cannily let his opponent do the heavy lifting). Respect, that is, deeply tinged with horror: Chiang could order the destruction of the dikes holding back the Yellow River in order to stop a Japanese advance, despite the ensuing, predictable deaths of hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants. The tragedy of Japan – a warrior society forced out of isolation in the 1850’s into a world of imperial rivalry to which it adapted all too well, and the victim of its own success in its wars with China in the 1890’s and with Russia in 1905 – is covered in revealing detail, as is Stalin’s too-clever attempt to initially support both sides of the Chinese Civil War in order to keep his huge southern neighbor divided and weak. The significance of Russian intervention in Manchuria at the end of the war, and its reverse colonialism there - extracting heavy industrial and transportation infrastructure created by the Japanese, rather than building anything of value - receives long-overdue attention. British and American diplomatic and military missteps, stemming from self-interest and ignorance about Asian history and culture, also receive due attention. . Korea plays a relatively minor role here: however, Professor Paine’s earlier work, “The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895”, contains a wealth of information about the Hermit Kingdom’s own troubled emergence from isolation in the 1860's at the insistence of a “Big Brotherly” Japan, and the ensuing struggle between China and Japan over control of that strategically (and tragically) placed peninsula. One key insight Professor Paine employs throughout the book is the critical distinction between the economic motivations of maritime powers, like Great Britain, Japan, and the United States, that benefit from a relatively open global economic system, and continental powers like Russia and China, for whom a geographically defined political and economic system are practically synonymous. This renders continental powers particularly sensitive about borders and territorial control; Russian and Chinese interventionism and expansionism today certainly bears this out. "The Wars for Asia" is a must read for anyone with an interest in, not just the Asian past, but a complex and troubled global present.
B**M
Masterful synthesis, bursting with insights
Broadly speaking, this is a military history of Northeast Asia in the first half of the 20th century, with China as the necessary center of gravity. In a narrower sense, however, this is really a book about China's 14-year struggle with Japan before and during World War II, with a lengthy prologue about events in the period until 1931, and a shorter epilogue about the civil war that devoured China from 1945 to 1949. Whether one decides to read this book one way or the other, it's a revelation. Virtually every page has a striking insight. To take one example, it has the clearest explanation of the 1936 Xian Incident, its political context and strategic consequences that I have read anywhere. To fully appreciate The Wars for Asia it probably helps to already know something about East Asian history, but I believe even "new readers" will benefit tremendously from this masterful work. What one gets from this book is, in essence, an intelligent synthesis of recent research into the period, seen through the prism of Dr Paine's sharp analytical mind. The array of sources cited in the text is staggering. The author has digested all the relevant literature in English, in addition to a huge literature of more marginal relevance. On top of this comes familiarity with a vast amount of research published in Chinese, Japanese and even Russian. The result is a story that is comprehensive in the best sense of the word. The author is a professor at the US Naval War College, and in a few places the book reads a bit like expanded lecture notes - but in a good way. It has the wry humor that experienced university teachers adopt to keep their students' attention, and in works well in written form as well, to make this not just an educational but also an entertaining read. I don't know Dr Paine's other book on East Asian history, an account of the First Sino-Japanese War in the late 19th century, but it's next on my reading list!
L**E
Brilliant History Writing
Masterful history writing with an abundance of detail and insightful analysis. Prof. Paine, as in her lectures, thoughtfully explains the emergence of the present from the roots of the past.
A**N
The right pace, the right level of detail. Strong recommendation for the ones who want to understand more the first Japan Empire, China's struggle to transition from Qing dynasty to modernization and (!) the Russian - Chinese relations.
A**I
Sarah paine è stata una grande scoperta
M**O
The content is riveting but the binding sucks...
C**N
Interesante
C**K
j'ai acheté ce livre en englais pour le thème particulièrement motivant pour moi, mais je m'attendais à une bonne dose d'anticommunisme vu l'origine de l'auteure. malheureusement, c'est au-delà. il s'agit d'un brûlot anti-russe est la russie des tzars y est traitée presque aussi bas que celle des soviétiques : pour sarah paine, la seule ambition qu'a eu la russie à travers les âges, a été de diviser ses voisins pour les contrôler et agrandir son empire ... étonnant que vu ses origines, elle n'applique pas cette maxime à propre son pays mais également à la maison mère, feu l'empire britannique, qui a eut des colonies sur les 4 continents pendant trois siècles. quand au communisme, il est considéré comme n'étant que l'émanation de la jalousie envers les riches, de la violence et de la propagande ! propagande dont son pays ne s'est absolument pas rendu coupable envers le même monde communiste depuis le début de la guerre froide ( et même avant ). bien entendu, le communisme n'a joué aucun rôle pour émanciper les peuples arriérés des pays féodaux tel que la russie et la chine durant le 20ième siècle, pour éduquer les masses et industrialiser ces mêmes pays rapidement ... la rupture du premier front unis en 1927 est expliqué comme une manipulation de staline pour diviser une chine potentiellement dangereuse pour son pays et régler ses comptes avec trotski. la plupart des spécialistes français considèrent qu'il s'agit surtout d'une erreur du komintern. erreur produite par le dogmatisme léninien comme quoi dans les pays colonisés, le prolétariat devait s'unir à la bourgeoisie contre les puissances impériales ... passons. pour sarah paine, la longue marche n'a absolument rien eu d'héroïque. une armée qui part à 80.000 et qui finit à 8000 un an après, n'a rien pu faire d'héroïque bien évidemment. on aurait voulu la voire, sarah paine, avec un fusil sur l'épaule et des sandales de paille de riz aux pieds, en train d'escalader des glaciers à 4000 d'altitude ! mais bien entendu, edgar snow a été manipulé par les communistes. sarah paine, elle, n'a pas été manipulée par qui que ce soit ? mcarthy, jon holiday, brzezinski ? quand à l'incident de xi an en 1936, il est du d'après elle, une nouvelle foi, à la manipulation de staline, qui préférait que les masses chinoises se fassent tuer par les japonais en lieu et place de ses soldats. ces pauvres chinois étaient tellement bêtes qu'ils ne comprenaient pas tout le bien que leur voulaient les japonais ... c'est ce que les habitants de nankin ont vu en décembre 1937. en dehors de ça, le récit de la guerre civile chinoise est confus car l'auteure revient constamment en arrière. certainement qu'elle est une adepte de l' histoire non chronologique, tel qu'on l'enseigne dorénavant dans les écoles occidentales ? tellement qu'au beau milieu du livre, elle revient subrepticement sur la révolution de 1911, qui aurait pourtant du se trouver au début de son ouvrage. j'ai refermé le livre quand j'ai acquis la certitude qu'elle faisait en plus des erreurs de dates : elle prétend que l'armée de zhang xueliang attaque l'armée rouge durant l'été 1935. alors qu' à cette date cette dernière était perdue dans les contreforts inaccessibles du tibet. pour moi, elle ne maîtrise pas la guerre civile chinoise, sujet qui ne doit pas l'intéresser : pas d'analyse sociologique de cette dernière à attendre. ces chercheurs américains de la côte est d'aujourd'hui devraient se poser la question pourquoi leur pays a refusé que l'on organise des élections en chine en 1946 ? au sud vietnam en 1955 ? parce que les gens allaient massivement voter pour les communistes. tout expliquer par les complots c'est voire l'histoire par le petit bout de la lorgnette. j'ai mis une deuxième étoile pour la supposée bonne connaissance de l'économie et de la politique japonaise d'avant guerre.
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