The sub-title of this outstanding study starts with the words triumph and tragedy. These were the outcomes of the twelve years of wars that wracked China between 1937 and 1949, from the start of the Resistance War to the end of the Civil War. Triumph and tragedy did not come in equal parts. For China there was more tragedy than triumph. In the political world the triumph switched from the Nationalist government at the start of the war years to the Communists in 1949. No one could have forecast this outcome—so much of what happened depended on “chance and contingency” (226).

The Japanese justifications for invading China are hard to fathom. The first justification was economic, to give crowded Japan Lebensraum. The second was the containment of Soviet communism. The third was Pan Asianism, the destruction of Western imperialism in Asia. The first of these was achieved, but only briefly. The third was achieved, but it brought with it Japan's own demise as an imperialist power. The second was always contradictory. It led to the attack not on the Chinese Communists but on the anti-Communist Nationalists. After General Zhukov's victory at Nomonhan in 1939, the Soviet Union was never a Japanese target. Instead Japan, by continuing to attack the Nationalists, helped the eventual triumph of the Chinese Communists.

The contradiction between aims and actions was evident again, quite starkly, in the Ichigo Campaign (1944–45). While the other Axis powers were on the defensive, and the Allies were fighting the last great battles in the European theatre, Japan launched a huge offensive campaign. The justification for the campaign was to link South China with Singapore by road—an aim that a cursory look at a map shows to be misguided. Half a million Japanese soldiers went into action in central China, against a similar number of Nationalist troops. The fighting brought victory for Japan and the ruination of the Nationalist armies. The Nationalist disaster in the campaign allowed the Communists, whose armies were not involved, to feel able to launch into civil war as soon as the Japanese were defeated in the Pacific War. For Chinese who knew their history there was a powerful analogy: exactly three centuries before the Manchus had taken control over China and founded the Qing Dynasty after the Ming Dynasty was brought down by peasant rebels. The analogy was that the Japanese helped to bring the Communists to power.

Van de Ven offers clear analyses of the complex wartime international relations. At the start of the Anti-Japanese War China had sympathy but very little support from other countries. They had to fight the war on their own—and there was no option but to fight. Japanese brutality in 1937–38—the Nanjing and other massacres—convinced most Chinese that there could be no surrender. Van de Ven describes some of the failed attempts to prevent or stop what was an avoidable war, but he shows that those who did not resist were doomed to be seen later on as traitors. During the war, China won international prestige, and the end of the Unequal Treaties established China as a member of the Allied leadership. But the Allies gave little direct help to China. Only the United States was in a position to help; its greatest contribution was the strategic bombing of Japanese-occupied Wuhan in 1944, before the bombing of Dresden or of Japanese cities—almost a practice run for the later raids. The US role during the civil war was equivocal. General George Marshal's imposed cease fire in 1946, when Communist armies in Manchuria were on the run, is still contentious. The cease fire gave General Lin Biao's armies the opportunity to regroup and retrain. Marshal was blamed in the US for being pro-Communist; in Nationalist military circles he has been blamed for costing them the war.

Van de Ven's descriptions of the two Chinese leaders are excellent pictures of two diametrically different men. Chiang Kai-shek was stiff and chilly, a martinet, unable to inspire unity; Mao was earthy, uncouth, and unpredictable. Both were ruthless, though Chiang was no match for Mao in terms of brutality: Mao was the “master technician of violence” (133).

China at War has a strong human touch. It is interleaved with the memoirs of two people, one a Nationalist official, Chen Kewen, the other a student, Chi Pang-yuan. These memoirs show the effects of the war on civilians, the trauma and the hardship of war, and the shifts in emotion, from powerful nationalism to depression and eventually despair. Both memoirs were published outside China; if there were such memoirs on the Mainland, they were most likely destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, when reference to the Nationalists was forbidden and dangerous.

Van de Ven's study emphasizes the length of the wars and their much longer impact, far beyond 1949. China's economy was set back decades; it did not reach prewar levels for more than four decades. The flowering of cultural life that China saw in the 1920s and 1930s has not been matched since. Politically Taiwan is still separate from the Mainland, and the Mainland is stuck under the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party, which has little in common, in ideology or size, with the one that took over China in 1949. The personal costs for many Chinese may be even greater. As a European, van de Ven understands from his own family's history that wars do not end with an armistice. Intergenerational trauma continues for decades, even past personal memory. He was born long after his grandfather was killed by the Nazis at the end of the European War, but his family was haunted by his loss. To read the account of this death, at the beginning of this moving book, is to understand the tragedy of war. The years 1937 to 1949 have shaped and distorted China and Asia for more than half a century.