A Military History of China

Military Review, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Lewis Bernstein

A MILITARY HISTORY OF CHINA, David A. Graff and Robin Higham, eds., Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 2002, 316 pages, $31.00.

A Military History of China is the first book in a Western language that describes the role of force and military institutions in modern Chinese military history in anything approaching a satisfactory form. Written for non-specialists, the book is organized into an introduction and 15 discrete essays. Five of the essays are thematic and deal with subjects like state-making and state-breaking; the Chinese Northern Frontier problem; naval operations; military writings; and continuities and dis-continuities. There is a brief survey of the Qing Empire, but the editors devoted most of the book to essays on narrowly drawn Chinese military history topics written since 1850.

Many of the topics are well known to modern Chinese history specialists, but they are undeservedly obscure to the general reader. For example, Maochun Yu's succinct essay on the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) outlines the causes of the titanic civil war (approximately 25 million people died) and gives a pithy campaign history in which he explains the reasons for Qing success and Taiping failure. In addition, he summarizes the best of the literature in English and gives some indication of the lacunae that remain in Taiping studies. Edward McCord's essay on warlordism follows a similar outline, succinct explanation, and a brief operational history and reasons for rise and decline. McCord presents the ablest summary of the phenomenon and when placed in context tells one much about the course of contemporary Chinese politics and the reasons for Chinese fears of "disorder."

Essays on the Sino-Japanese War and on Mao Tse-tung as a military leader, are similarly illuminating. William Wei, who has written about Chiang Kai-shek's 5th Bandit Extermination Campaign, uses his knowledge to make a realistic assessment of Mao Tse-tung as a soldier and a military theoretician. After peeling back the layers of myth, he finds Mao Tse-tung had mastered the organizational and political side of warfare but would have been lost had it not been for Zhu De. In a similar vein, Stephen MacKinnon writes about the Chinese Army's 1938 fight against the Japanese in the middle Yangzi around Hankou. He uses this brief case study to illuminate Chinese strategy and to show how the ferocity of the campaign figured in the further course of the war.

An essay about recent Chinese conflicts, by Larry Wortzel, and another about the contemporary People's Liberation Army, (PLA), by Jane Teufel Dreyer, ably dissect their subjects. Wortzel's conclusion--that China uses force or the threat of force as part of its diplomacy--is a particularly well-researched essay. While not reaching any startling conclusions, he gives the reader a summary of China's recent armed conflicts. Dreyer, on the other hand, concentrates on the PLA as it is today. She finds that great gaps exist between intentions and abilities and between plans and reality but ably explains why this is so. This collection is well done and anyone with a professional interest in China and the Chinese military should read these essays.

Lewis Bernstein, Ph.D., Huntsville, Alabama