China's war With Japan 1937-1945: the struggle for survival, by Rana Mitter, review After Pearl Harbour dragged the United States into the conflict, China benefited from some American support, but Chiang's relationship with his new ally proved stormy. In 1944, President Roosevelt ordered that Chiang should hand over command of all Nationalist forces to his American chief-of-staff, Joseph Stilwell. The humiliation reduced Chiang to noisy weeping. Mitter offers a lucid and moving account of the conflict's staggering military tragedies. But it is also a first-rate political and social history of China's wartime years. It describes the various forces contending for China: the dysfunctional Nationalist state in Chongqing; the communists led by Mao Tse-tung in the north-west; and the collaborationist regime of Wang Jingwei in the east. His use of diaries is one of the highlights of the book, humanising a story that might otherwise be dominated by battle formations and statistics. His mining of personal accounts illuminates the terror of air-raids, the ambivalence of collaborators and the resourceful desperation of refugees. A Mrs Yang, we learn, fled east China in the winter of 1937 with "only a few essentials, including two big turnips with 200 banknotes hidden inside, and some jewellery in a hollowed-out egg." Mitter looks beyond the war years to explain their consequences. They bore primarily on the future of the Chinese state. Before the outbreak of war, China's Nationalist Party had begun to construct a modernised government. By 1945, the war had fatally undermined its attempts at state-building. It also distracted Chiang from his campaigns to annihilate the communists and enabled them to expand their power base. In the early Sixties, a Japanese delegation visited Mao in Beijing and attempted to offer an apology for atrocities committed against the Chinese in the war. Mao batted it away: the Japanese Imperial Army, he countered, "created the conditions for our victory in the war of liberation... If I ought to thank anyone, it should be the Japanese militarists." Mao's state was relatively isolated from the main theatres of war. According to one estimate, around 90 per cent of the war's military casualties fought in Chiang's, and not Mao's, armies. More broadly, China's eight years of resistance changed the course of the Second World War. By refusing to surrender, China's armies detained at least half a million Japanese troops which could otherwise have been deployed to other territories. "A pacified China," Mitter argues, would "have made the invasion of British India much more plausible." In China, the Second World War remains an open national wound, commemorated in memorials, museums, books, films and on television. Chinese demonstrators regularly take to the streets, protesting Japan's inadequate acknowledgement of its wartime atrocities in China and its claims to disputed islands in the East China Sea. To understand East Asia's present and future, you have to understand its experiences in the Second World War. Mitter's elegant, rigorous and balanced account is an ideal guide to traumas that continue to cast a long shadow over the region. Julia Lovell's The Opium War is out in paperback China's War With Japan, 1937-1945: the Struggle for Survival by Rana Mitter 480pp, Allen Lane, t £23 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 RRP £25, ebook £14.99