Diana Lary

Diana Lary, one of the foremost historians of the period, tells the tragic history of China's War of Resistance and its consequences from the perspective of those who went through it. Using archival evidence only recently made available, interviews with survivors, and extracts from literature, she creates a vivid and highly disturbing picture of the havoc created by the war, the destruction of towns and villages, the displacement of peoples, and the accompanying economic and social disintegration. As the author suggests in a new interpretation of modern Chinese history, far from stemming the spread of communism from the USSR, which was the Japanese pretext for invasion, the horrors of the war, and the damage it created, nurtured the Chinese Communist Party and helped it to win power in 1949.

Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937-1945

The Chinese People at War

Diana Lary examines how the common soldier in Warlord China became an instrument of oppression and terror.

Chinese Common Soldiers 1911-1937

Warlord Soldiers

Over the past century and a half, China has experienced foreign invasion, warfare, political turmoil and revolution, along with massive economic and technological change. Through all this change there is one stable element: grandmothers, as child carers, household managers, religious devotees, transmitters of culture, and above all, sources of love, warmth and affection. In this interdisciplinary and longitudinal study, China's Grandmothers sheds light on the status and lives of grandmothers in China over the years from the late Qing Dynasty to the twenty-first century. Combining a wide range of historical and biographical materials, Diana Lary explores the changes and continuities in the lives of grandmothers through revolution, wars, and radical upheaval to the present phase of economic growth. Informed by her own experience as a grandchild and grandmother, Lary offers a fresh and compelling way of looking at gender, family, and aging in modern Chinese society.

Gender, Family, and Ageing from Late Qing to Twenty-First Century

China's Grandmothers

Hans van de Ven

Stephen MacKinnon

Negotiating China's Destiny explains how China developed from a country that hardly mattered internationally into the important world power it is today. Before World War II, China had suffered through five wars with European powers as well as American imperial policies resulting in economic, military, and political domination. This shifted dramatically during WWII, when alliances needed to be realigned, resulting in the evolution of China's relationships with the USSR, the U.S., Britain, France, India, and Japan. Based on key historical archives, memoirs, and periodicals from across East Asia and the West, this book explains how China was able to become one of the Allies with a seat on the Security Council, thus changing the course of its future. Breaking with U.S.-centered analyses which stressed the incompetence of Chinese Nationalist diplomacy, Negotiating China's Destiny makes the first sustained use of the diaries of Chiang Kai-shek (which have only become available in the last few years) and who is revealed as instrumental in asserting China's claims at this pivotal point. Negotiating China's Destiny demonstrates that China's concerns were far broader than previously acknowledged and that despite the country's military weakness, it pursued its policy of enhancing its international stature, recovering control over borderlands it had lost to European imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and becoming recognized as an important allied power with determination and success.

Negotiating China's Destiny in World War II

Throughout its modern history, China has suffered from immense destruction and loss of life from warfare. During its worst period of warfare, the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), millions of civilians lost their lives. For China, the story of modern war-related death and suffering has remained hidden. Hundreds of massacres are still unrecognized by the outside world and even by China itself. The focus of this original hisotry is on the social and psychological, not the economic, costs of war on the country.

The Impact of Warfare on Modern China

Scars of War

Stephen R. MacKinnon

Examining the consequences of warfare, as they are still felt by contemporary China, these seven essays describe wartime atrocities in Xuzhou, collaboration with the Japanese occupation in Jiading, and the conditions of refugees in Wuhan. The social and psychological impact of war on civilian populations is emphasized. Four pages of black and white photographs by Robert Capa are included. Contributors include historians and political scientists from North America and Asia. c. Book News Inc.

The Scars of War

Thomas Gottschang

Between the 1890s and the Second World War, twenty-five million people traveled from the densely populated North China provinces of Shandong and Hebei to seek employment in the growing economy of China's three northeastern provinces, the area known as Manchuria. This was the greatest population movement in modern Chinese history and ranks among the largest migrations in the world. Swallows and Settlers is the first comprehensive study of that migration. Drawing methods from their respective fields of economics and history, the coauthors focus on both the broad quantitative outlines of the movement and on the decisions and experiences of individual migrants and their families. In readable narrative prose, the book lays out the historical relationship between North China and the Northeast (Manchuria) and concludes with an examination of ongoing population movement between these regions since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.

The Great Migration from North China to Manchuria

Swallows and Settlers

Lary

A study of the tensions between region and nation in Republican China. Diana Lary gives a detailed examination of Kwangsi province in south-west China, the home base of a major warlord clique that was important both for its interesting internal politics and for its national influence in the late 1920s and the 1930s. She reconstructs with imagination and thoroughness the intricate political and military history of the nation, but without losing sight of the overall regional character of the Kwangsi government and its policies. She shows how the regional leaders responded to central breakdown, what sense they had of the nation even in its weakened condition. China is usually studied as a monolithic entity; Diana Lary demonstrates that such a simple view must fail, that China also consists of a large number of distinct regions with special patterns of relationship to the centre.

The Kwangsi Clique in Chinese Politics 1925-1937

Region and Nation

A new social history of China's Civil War, 1945-9, which brought dramatic political and social revolution to China.

China's Civil War

Twenty-first century China is emerging from decades of war and revolution into a new era. Yet the past still haunts the present. The ideals of the Chinese Republic, which was founded almost a century ago after 2000 years of imperial rule, still resonate as modern China edges towards openness and democracy. Diana Lary traces the history of the Republic from its beginnings in 1912, through the Nanjing decade, the warlord era, and the civil war with the Peoples' Liberation Army which ended in defeat in 1949. Thereafter, in an unusual excursion from traditional histories of the period, she considers how the Republic survived on in Taiwan, comparing its ongoing prosperity with the economic and social decline of the Communist mainland in the Mao years. This introductory textbook for students and general readers is enhanced with biographies of key protagonists, Chinese proverbs, love stories, poetry and a feast of illustrations.

Diana Lary

Books

Your next favorite book is out there