The standard historical view of the Sino-Japanese War has been most clearly set by the works of scholars like the late Lloyd Eastman; journalists Theodore White, Graham Peck, and Jack Belden; and U.S. State Department foreign service diplomats. Basically, they saw the Guomindang as a corrupt regime headed by a bumbling autocrat, who commanded a military incapable of fostering a modern nation-state or relieving the plight of its own citizens, and was engaged instead in policies that only exacerbated Chinese miseries. Recent scholarship has tended to try to resuscitate the record of Jiang Jieshi and to find “positive” developments of state-building during the war years. Yet, these two books rip us with a vengeance back to the stark reality that the Sino-Japanese War was about “human suffering” and that the regime in Chongqing was basically impotent in alleviating or, in any way, transforming the evolving human tragedy.

In her down-to-earth, pull-no-punches rhetorical style, Diana Lary makes clear from the beginning (p. 3) that she disagrees with Duara's mildly negative view that wars were “utterly devastating but temporary”; she finds this war fundamentally “transformative” in Chinese history. Her approach is chronological; her constant attention and acute insight are on the maelstrom of war, destruction, and social suffering, following Pierre Bourdieu's description of such suffering in his 1993 La misère du monde (translated by Priscilla Ferguson as The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). Lary's is a masterful work, made more striking by her use of techniques such as inserting chengyu, “four character phrases and quotations” (p. 10), throughout the text and especially her creative list of readings at the end of chapters. Lary is forthright in saying, “I have not used Japanese sources, which tend not to reflect the suffering of occupied populations” (p. 9)—in other studies, this would perhaps raise eyebrows, but, given Lary's purpose in this book, the rationale seems exactly on target. Lary is completely successful in her efforts to depict the suffering, the waste, and the long-term impact of war on the Chinese people. In her dedication, she notes the phrase “lacrimae rerum”—”the tears of things” from the Aeneid. She explains, “The tears are for the sadness and anguish war produces, and the waste it causes.”

Underscoring Lary's acute sense of the meaning of suffering and the reality of compassion are the diaries of Minnie Vautrin and Tsen Shui-fang. They detail the most gruesome suffering in the war's most horrifically tragic episode, the Nanjing massacre. Vautrin, the head of Ginling College in Nanjing, was key in establishing and controlling the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, the effort to shelter refugees at risk for rape or murder by Japanese soldiers. Tsen was the only nurse in the Ginling College compound, whose refugee numbers swelled quickly from four to ten thousand in two weeks in December 1937 (its designed “capacity” was 2,750). Vautrin was literally on guard around the clock, trying to keep Japanese soldiers from entering the compound, repeatedly stopping rapes as they were occurring, being in charge of procuring food for the refugees, and trying to keep the campus from becoming “a toilet” (p. 69). Japanese soldiers continually invaded the area, in efforts to seize any Chinese males who were suspected of having served in the Chinese army; in many cases, the Chinese had not been in the army, but the Japanese seized them anyway, tied them together, and shot them. For Vautrin and Tsen, the days were horrific: Vautrin wrote that she was “utterly exhausted from the terrific strain and sadness of these days” (p. 58). She repeatedly (pp. 131 and 163) noted the work of the Red Swastika Society for its burial of war dead, not noting (if indeed she knew) that its leaders were key Nanjing collaborators with the Japanese. It is perhaps little wonder that in the end, though she saved many lives and prevented many rapes, the severe strain was devastatingly mortal: depressed and in declining mental health, she committed suicide in Indianapolis in 1941.

There are, in my opinion, two areas of concern about Lary's interpretation in light of my own research in the period. First is her stress on the nationalism she claims sprang from the war. In my research in the unoccupied areas of Zhejiang, controlled during the war by the Guomindang, I find no evidence of any rise of national feeling. As people were under fire and many fleeing as refugees, the tendency was to protect home, family, and native place. Under siege, the family drew in upon itself; for these people there was no apparent sense of “national” concerns—even among elites like Feng Zikai, the safety of family and native place was the crucial focus. Thus, Lary's statements like the following seem awry: “China was on fire with patriotism and with burning indignation that her sacred territory had been invaded. . . . The Japanese invasion produced. . . a united nation” (p. 16). Surveying the politics of the late 1930s and the 1940s, I would argue shows little sense of a “united nation.” What specific data gives rise to the assertion that “a new national spirit blossomed” (p. 38)?

On the basis of what I have seen in Zhejiang, Lary's assertion (p. 52) that “The spirit of defiance included a deep appreciation for the defenders of China's sacred soil—her soldiers” is completely amiss. The memoirs and accounts of hundreds of Zhejiangese show that the Chinese people distrusted Chinese soldiers as much as and even perhaps more than they did Japanese soldiers. This reaction came from elites as well as non-elites; men from all social classes were often simply kidnapped and sent to the front by the Chinese army—not a way to engender “deep appreciation” for China's soldiers or their aims. In the same vein, my studies show Lary's statement (pp. 38–39) to be off target in understanding the Chinese reaction to the war: “The Japanese invasion made most Chinese into nationalists; the old responsibilities to the family came second.” I have countless memoirs and wenshi ziliao accounts that take the specifically opposite point of view. Family and native place always came first.

Indeed the war was complex and what occurred in one area may not have been replicated in another. Yet, in evaluating the meaning of the war, we must take care not to rely on generalized euphoric rhetoric about nationalism that few—at least in unoccupied Zhejiang—were feeling. Awareness of the complexity of war is crucial in setting forth credible interpretations of the period.

Another area of concern is Lary's insistence on drawing a direct line between the Resistance War and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. “The violence of the Cultural Revolution [Lary posits] was an outcome of the eight years upheaval of the Resistance War, which came to an end only two decades before the Cultural Revolution started” (pp 12–13). “The chaos of the war can be seen as a direct antecedent of the Cultural Revolution” (p. 13). Frankly, I do not see the logic of such a conclusion. In historical interpretation, context becomes a crucial element. Yes, the Resistance War ended “only two decades before the Cultural Revolution started.” But in those two intervening decades, there was a civil war, the birth and substantial successes of the early PRC, the Great Leap Forward, and the Great Famine. The context for historical developments in the mid-1960s was completely different from the context of the Resistance War. People reacted in the 1960s in a totally different context from what they reacted to in the early 1940s. To draw some sort of straight line connecting the former with the latter seems to strain credulity. Lary contends that the “link is in the terrible damage done by war to the fabric of Chinese society” (p. 13). But this also raises questions: How does one gauge the health and stability of the “fabric of Chinese society”? Could it be said that the madness of the warlord era from the 1910s through the 1930s was equally damaging to the fabric of Chinese society—perhaps even more than the Resistance War, since it was Chinese against Chinese? In the end, is it credible to decipher the roots of the madness that came two decades after this war to the war itself? Or were there other progenitors of this madness?

These considerations aside, Lary has made an important contribution toward our seeing the compelling horrors and understanding the bitter nature of the Sino-Japanese War. Her conclusion, “Final Words,” leaves us with the striking images from Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, underscoring the futility of war (pp. 213–214). A lightning bolt has split open a mass grave.