This slim volume is packed with detail and insight into a nearly forgotten episode in the history of Shanghai during the Anti-Japanese War of 1937–45. In the fall of 1937, and continuing into 1940, a “safe zone” was established in the old panshi section of the Chinese Yuyuan city bordering the French concession. The hero of the day, and of the book, was the senior French Jesuit missionary in Shanghai, Father Robert Jacquinot de Besange, who created the safe zone. During its two-plus years of existence, the Jacquinot Safe Zone, as it was called, sheltered up to 300,000 men, women, and children.

For the first time, Marcia Ristaino tells the story of Father Jacquinot's remarkably successful effort in exhaustive detail. The book begins as an admiring biography of Jacquinot. Her coverage of his youth and more than twenty years of experience in China before the outbreak of war in the summer of 1937 demonstrates that Jacquinot had the experience, status, contacts, and language skills (including Japanese) to make the safety zone idea work. Ristaino then shows how Jacquinot gained experience by organizing safe zones on a smaller scale for flood and war victims around Shanghai in the early 1930s. Her accounts of the battles around Shanghai in 1932 and 1937 provide necessary and succinct summaries of the military context. This is followed by a well-organized description of the now famous and much analyzed Nanjing massacre of December 1937.

The latter half of the book deals with how the Jacquinot Safe Zone was organized, financed, and maintained. International financial support, not surprisingly, was critical to its success—the result of a concerted fund-raising trip to North America by Jacquinot himself between May and late June of 1938. The other key to the zone's success was Jacquinot's carefully articulated “neutrality” while war was raging around Shanghai. He was especially effective in maintaining good relations with notoriously tough Japanese commanders such as Matsui Iwane, the butcher of Nanjing. At the same time, he worked closely with Shanghai's Chinese mayor, Yu Hongjun. In a number of ways, his biggest problems were with the Shanghai Municipal Council (represented by foreign powers) in the concession areas, which seemed to be bending over backward not to offend the Japanese invading and then occupying force.

Overall, this is an interesting and well-told story. As Ristaino suggests, the dominance of Chinese Communist Party and Nationalist Party narratives about the war years helps to explain why refugee relief questions were so overlooked until recently in the secondary literature about the war. At the end of the book, Ristaino points out how important the Jacquinot Safe Zone was as a precedent in the formation of Article 15 on safe zones for the 1949 Geneva Convention (United Nations) on refugee treatment. It is mentioned by name in Article 15, a copy of which is provided as an appendix to the book.

Ristaino's use of Western-language sources, including multiarchival collections located around the world as well as the contemporary English press of Shanghai, is impressive and comprehensive. Following her sources, the narrative remains narrowly focused on the safe zone and Jacquinot's less successful efforts to launch similar safe zones elsewhere in wartime China and (in 1945–46) in Europe. The larger precedent setting relief work by the Chinese government (organized by the Nationalists from Wuhan and Chongqing) is hardly mentioned. Other than referring to Bryna Goodman's book (Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995]), the reader does not get much sense from Ristaino's account of the tradition of natural disaster relief aid that was provided by regional guild organizations and the like in Shanghai and elsewhere. The efforts of the modern Chinese YMCA/YWCA, Red Cross, Red Swastika, and Japanese occupational authorities receive little attention. A number of good works in Chinese on these efforts, such as those by Sun Yankui, now exist, but a picture of how the Jacquinot Safe Zone fit into this larger refugee relief context is missing here.

The result is that the Chinese population is depicted passively in The Jacquinot Safe Zone as victims. Agency seems to lie with the foreign community in the person of Jacquinot. Perhaps that was true for Shanghai during the Japanese occupation. The war lasted eight long years and touched most of China proper. By 1939, the central government was making a sincere effort at organizing refugee relief in central and southwestern China. As with Jacquinot's safe zone, relief aid was inadequate to the needs of refugees as a whole. The numbers were too overwhelming and the condition of the refugees too desperate. Including those fleeing into and out of Shanghai, total estimates of the size of the refugee population at the national level run to 100 million for the entire war period. Still, what was achieved in the way of refugee relief by a number of bodies, public and private, with the largest number being served by the central government organizations, was impressive and important historically because it laid a foundation for the organization of social services in the People's Republic of China and Republic of China on Taiwan. More attention to agency on the Chinese side, even in Shanghai, is needed.