In early 1990, immediately after my battalion commander announced that I had been appointed as an assistant commander in one of his five companies, he took me to the company’s kitchen and said, “One of the primary duties of a company’s assistant commander in the People’s Liberation Army is to keep the kitchen running well.” After I shared this experience in a debriefing with my home department in Beijing, the director laughed and said, “Didn’t you know the saying, ‘A good meal is far better than a political commissar?’” Food supply was essential to both the military unit and the state that it was serving.
In Grains of Conflict, Jennifer Yip reviews this critical but underexplored issue during China’s war of resistance against Japan through the lens of total war, a theory she explores in her introduction. Developed by European, Japanese and Soviet Russian strategists during the interwar period, “total war” became the intellectual foundation for Chinese thinkers who argued for a total and protracted war against Japan’s encroachments after 1931. Their concept became the foundation of Chiang Kai-shek’s grand strategy against Japan. As Southwest China was the Nationalist home base for this strategy, the Yangzi River, the principal communication line between Sichuan and the productive Yangzi Valley region, was critical to Chiang’s war efforts. In Yip’s view, the plains east of the gateway to Sichuan, the Three Gorges and Yichang became the most significant battlefield of the war, a theme she explores in chapter one.
Yip argues that Chiang resorted to total war after he “escaped” the Japanese “grasp” that had aimed at the “quick annihilation of the Chinese government” (p. 2). As the war entered a stage of attrition, “agricultural production, grain market fluctuations, economic blockades, tax revenue and transportation system” became “pressing” (p. 3). Because China’s economy was “premodern” (p. 4), Chiang had to defend the productive Yichang region, which meant resorting to imperial China’s problematic institutions, regardless of their severe social and political consequences.
The book outlines China’s food collection and distribution systems from the fall of Yichang in June 1940 to the beginning of the Japanese Operation Ichigo offensives in April 1944. Chapter one focuses on the Yangzi River and its valley downward from the Three Gorges, and it tries to demonstrate that the area between the Three Gorges and Yichang was the centre of gravity of the war. It examines in detail how Chiang lost the battle, arguing that this loss had profound consequences on both the defence of Sichuan and the availability of food supplies.
Chapter two explores food and fodder supplies and their composition in Chiang’s army, the structure of the grain requisition in the civilian branch of Chiang’s Nationalist government and his army’s knowledge of logistics. It also outlines the grain requisition systems on the sides of the Japanese and their collaborationist government in Nanjing as well as that of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in addition to the food supply system during the First Battle of Burma in 1942.
Chapter three reviews the granary system in Chiang’s administrative zones, including its imperial origin and the technical issues related to grain storage. The situation of Chiang’s food supplies was made worse by wartime inflation. To offset this, Chiang introduced land taxation in kind in 1942. However, this new form of taxation not only required more efforts in food transportation, restoration and distribution, but also led to more spoilage. The campaign also revived the old baojia system, first introduced by Lord Shang in the 4th century BC, which mobilized grassroots units consisting of a handful of households to be responsible for a range of civil and military duties.
Alongside taxation in kind and the baojia mass mobilization system, Chiang also implemented a relay transportation system, an upgraded version of imperial China’s yiyun courier system, which transported anything from mail to bulky items such as food supplies. Chapter four outlines the yiyun system and its devastating impacts on wartime China. The yiyun and taxation-in-kind systems meant more corvée, restoration and transportation facilities and machinery. With rampant inflation, the budgets for yiyun and the construction of various facilities could not keep up with rising prices. This led to the emergence of various kinds of resistance and widespread malnutrition among Chiang’s troops.
Chapter five examines the competition for grains among Chiang’s Nationalist government, the CCP authorities and the collaborationist government led by Wang Jingwei. In striking contrast to their rivals, the Nationalists “spent far less time than the CCP investing in grassroots outreach” (p. 234). The author notes that the CCP had its own food supply system that fitted its guerrilla warfare. As Chiang was unable to solve these problems through his taxation and yiyun measures, his efforts in conducting a total war of resistance with preindustrial resources would result in the postwar destruction of his regime. The book concludes with the start of Operation Ichigo, which altered wartime China’s political landscape.
Yip’s observations are based on her extensive exploration of prewar and wartime articles and reports as well as archival documents from China, Japan, Britain and the United States. As food related to everyone’s daily life and its restoration and transportation involved the institutions mentioned above, the book reveals an unexplored aspect of wartime China – the common people’s resistance against the Nationalist government and their social, political and institutional motivations. Yi’s book therefore offers a pioneering overview of social life in wartime China.
However, this aspect is also one of the weaknesses of the book. The primary thread of the book is around China’s survival in a total and protracted war that Chiang had designed and implemented. But the author does not cite Chiang’s wartime diaries at all. She regards China, a country of dozens of rival military-political entities under the auspices of the Nationalist government, as a regular nation-state in the process of modernization. Nor does the book mention Chiang’s concerns about inflation, taxation in kind, yiyun and the battles around Yichang and in Burma.
The volume is therefore episodic and leaves a set of essential questions unanswered. One of these relates to food supplies for the Chinese forces in the sparsely populated western area of Yunnan during the Second Battle of Burma. Another concerns the famines in the provinces of Henan and Gansu in 1943 that Chiang mentioned in his diaries.
Yip devotes many pages to the CCP in this book, but she does not consult Mao’s wartime directives regarding building and developing military-fiscal party-states in which food requisition, storage and distribution were essential and directly related to Chiang’s policies. Although the book recognizes that the CCP adopted a different approach to food supplies from the Nationalists, it does not address how this was organized.
The book’s findings – the common people’s resistance – and the shortcomings outlined above indicate the constraints of studies of social history and traditional political-military history. While the former portrays vivid social tension, it neglects the crucial parts played by supreme leaders at critical moments. Yip identifies the vital role of food supplies in wartime China. However, she does not effectively link this key topic to the respective policies of Chiang and Mao that would decide China’s fate.
