In her book on the soldier image, Yan Xu argues “that the cultural negotiations over how to create and support a strong army were central to the state-building processes in modern China from 1924 to 1945” (4). To prove her argument she traces the soldier image from the founding of the Whampoa Academy in 1924 as one of the Guomindang's (GMD) earliest efforts at state-building to the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1945, concentrating on foot soldiers in combat units as the focus of war culture during these two decades. She takes a cultural-political perspective to analyze the soldier image as it was reflected in a variety of sources such as Chiang Kai-shek's speeches and lectures, conscription laws, material used in military education, political propaganda, war reportage, and autobiographical texts. As the title indicates, questions of state-building and state–society relations form the framework for this analysis. The author gives an outline of relevant discussions, including the question of the achievements or failure of the GMD's state-building efforts (which, according to her, intensified during the war) and the relation between the state and the professions. The soldier figure, in her view, was a medium for these professions to articulate their own stance on state-society relations and their own vision of state-building.

The book comprises six chapters, the first two of which cover the GMD's political discourse of the soldier figure, based on an analysis of Chiang Kai-shek's speeches during the early years of the Whampoa Academy (chapter 1) and the conscription law of 1933 (and its later revisions) as well as the military propaganda of the 1930s and 40s (chapter 2). Here, the author demonstrates how the Whampoa Academy was used to train disciplined soldiers who were not only destined for leading roles in the army but also meant to be models for the entire citizenry—a feature that became most obvious during the GMD's New Life Movement from 1934 on. Whampoa was a place of political indoctrination and ritual, disciplined personal behavior, regulated emotions, and a cult of physical sacrifice. “The soldier figure in Chiang's speeches was depicted as a warrior; combat and death were idealized and romanticized” (35). This image of the heroic soldier was used for military mobilization and for legitimizing compulsory conscription, but it did not remain uncontested. Whampoa cadets protested against the academy's poor administration and refused to comply with Chiang's policy of nonresistance. And the general public was quite aware of the gap between the ideals of state propaganda and the realities of military life. In chapters 3 to 5, the author turns to quite specific urban publics and their response to the soldier image in state propaganda, namely urban intellectuals and professionals who took up a variety of war-related roles such as army educator, propaganda worker, or war reporter (chapter 3); army-affiliated writers—Xiao Jun, Qiu Dongping, and Xie Bingying—and their war reportage (chapter 4); and the educated youth addressed in a specific mobilization campaign in 1944, who expressed their own ideals of a democratic military organization (chapter 5). All chapters demonstrate how the patriotic outlook of these urban publics made them ally themselves with the state but also complicate and de-idealize the state's soldier image. The soldiers figuring in the texts of urban intellectuals and writers were ordinary human beings who suffered physical violence and endured emotional affliction. “The brutality and absurdity of war and the trauma soldiers endured were hardly understandable to the civilians. The writers’ combat stories removed the glorious aura surrounding death, bravery, and military discipline that Chiang fashioned in his speeches” (119–20). Finally, chapter 6 turns to the image of the soldier in Communist Yan'an and shows how the popular form of yangge was used to advocate solidarity between the army and the people—in the author's eye a typical example of the Communists’ strategy of state-building by mobilizing social emotions.

The book is an important contribution to a highly relevant field in the study of China. Indeed, war had a huge impact on Chinese society during the Republican era and we still have a quite fragmentary understanding of the various wars, the culture that supported warfare, and the soldier image as a focal point in military discourse. The material quoted in the book offers a rich variety of angles and topics open to scholarship on war and war culture. The author, for her part, chose a quite specific one, discussing the soldier image as a matter of state-building. While this framework is reasonable and helps her to form clear arguments, other dimensions central to war—violence, physical injury, trauma, victimhood—take a secondary place only, as discursive fields where different publics define their position vis-à-vis the state. More studies on war in modern China are needed.