The Wars for Asia, 1911 1949

The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949 shows that the Western treatment of World War II, the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War as separate events misrepresents their overlapping connections and causes. The Chinese Civil War precipitated a long regional war between China and Japan that went global in 1941 when the Chinese found themselves fighting a civil war within a regional war within an overarching global war. The global war that consumed Western attentions resulted from Japan's peripheral strategy to cut foreign aid to China by attacking Pearl Harbour and Western interests throughout the Pacific in 1941. S. C. M. Paine emphasizes the fears and ambitions of Japan, China and Russia, and the pivotal decisions that set them on a collision course in the 1920s and 1930s. The resulting wars together yielded a viscerally anti-Japanese and unified Communist China, the still-angry rising power of the early twenty-first century.

Part I. Fear and Ambition: Japan, China, and Russia: 1. Introduction: the Asian roots of World War II; 2. Japan 1931-6: the containment of Russia and national restoration; 3. China 1926-36: chaos and the quest for the mandate of heaven; 4. Russia 1917-36: impending two-front war and world revolution; Part II. Nested Wars: A Civil War within a Regional War within a Global War: 5. Flashback to 1911 and the beginning of the long Chinese Civil War; 6. The regional war: the Second Sino-Japanese War; 7. The global war: World War I; 8. The final act of the long Chinese Civil War; 9. Conclusion: civil war as the prologue and epilogue to regional and global wars.