China's Civil War is the first book of its kind to offer a social history in English of the Civil War in 1945–9 that brought the Chinese Communist Party to power. Integrating history and memory, it surveys a period of intense upheaval and chaos to show how the Communist Party and its armies succeeded in overthrowing the Nationalist government to bring political and social revolution to China. Drawing from a collection of biographies, memoirs, illustrations and oral histories, Diana Lary gives a voice to those who experienced the war first-hand, exemplifying the direct effects of warfare - the separations and divisions, the exiles and losses, and the social upheaval that resulted from the conflict. Lary explores the long-term impact on Chinese societies on the Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong, which have all diverged far from pre-war Chinese society.
Diana Lary, one of the foremost historians of the period, tells the tragic history of China's War of Resistance and its consequences from the perspective of those who went through it. Using archival evidence only recently made available, interviews with survivors, and extracts from literature, she creates a vivid and highly disturbing picture of the havoc created by the war, the destruction of towns and villages, the displacement of peoples, and the accompanying economic and social disintegration. As the author suggests in this 2010 interpretation of modern Chinese history, far from stemming the spread of communism from the USSR, which was the Japanese pretext for invasion, the horrors of the war, and the damage it created, nurtured the Chinese Communist Party and helped it to win power in 1949.
Armies are made up of a small number of officers and a large number of ordinary soldiers, recruited from the working class or peasantry. When the military dominates a society, as it did in Warlord China, it is these ordinary soldiers who become the direct agents of oppression and terror. Asking who these men were, and why they turned on their own society, this book looks at the origins, training and behaviour of the soldiers of Warlord China. It thus provides a case study of the misery inflicted by military regimes on civilian societies. Military control in China was long drawn out, and fragmented. The Warlord period, in the first years of Republican China, has been designated as the darkest of Modern Chinese history. The soldiers who served in the warlord armies were considered to be the lowest of the low, and have not for that reason been a subject for study, but their impact on their society was enormous. Their parallels in other, contemporary societies are equally influential. Dian
This succinct, readable introduction to Chinese migration traces the huge population movements both within China and beyond its borders over thousands of years. Distinguished historian Diana Lary expl
This succinct, readable introduction to Chinese migration traces the huge population movements both within China and beyond its borders over thousands of years. Distinguished historian Diana Lary expl
Diana Lary, one of the foremost historians of the period, tells the tragic history of China's War of Resistance and its consequences from the perspective of those who went through it. Using archival evidence only recently made available, interviews with survivors, and extracts from literature, she creates a vivid and highly disturbing picture of the havoc created by the war, the destruction of towns and villages, the displacement of peoples, and the accompanying economic and social disintegration. As the author suggests in this 2010 interpretation of modern Chinese history, far from stemming the spread of communism from the USSR, which was the Japanese pretext for invasion, the horrors of the war, and the damage it created, nurtured the Chinese Communist Party and helped it to win power in 1949.
China's Civil War is the first book of its kind to offer a social history in English of the Civil War in 1945–9 that brought the Chinese Communist Party to power. Integrating history and memory, it surveys a period of intense upheaval and chaos to show how the Communist Party and its armies succeeded in overthrowing the Nationalist government to bring political and social revolution to China. Drawing from a collection of biographies, memoirs, illustrations and oral histories, Diana Lary gives a voice to those who experienced the war first-hand, exemplifying the direct effects of warfare - the separations and divisions, the exiles and losses, and the social upheaval that resulted from the conflict. Lary explores the long-term impact on Chinese societies on the Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong, which have all diverged far from pre-war Chinese society.
Twenty-first century China is emerging from decades of war and revolution into a new era. Yet the past still haunts the present. The ideals of the Chinese Republic, which was founded almost a century ago after 2000 years of imperial rule, still resonate as modern China edges towards openness and democracy. Diana Lary traces the history of the Republic from its beginnings in 1912, through the Nanjing decade, the warlord era, and the civil war with the Peoples' Liberation Army which ended in defeat in 1949. Thereafter, in an unusual excursion from traditional histories of the period, she considers how the Republic survived on in Taiwan, comparing its ongoing prosperity with the economic and social decline of the Communist mainland in the Mao years. This introductory textbook for students and general readers is enhanced with biographies of key protagonists, Chinese proverbs, love stories, poetry and a feast of illustrations.
Over the past century and a half, China has experienced foreign invasion, warfare, political turmoil, and revolution, along with massive economic and technological change. Through all this change, there is one stable element: grandmothers, as child carers, household managers, religious devotees, transmitters of culture, and, above all, sources of love, warmth, and affection. In this interdisciplinary and longitudinal study, China's Grandmothers sheds light on the status and lives of grandmothers in China over the years from the late Qing Dynasty to the twenty-first century. Combining a wide range of historical and biographical materials, Diana Lary explores the changes and continuities in the lives of grandmothers through revolution, wars, and radical upheaval to the present phase of economic growth. Informed by her own experience as a grandchild and grandmother, Lary offers a fresh and compelling way of looking at gender, family, and ageing in modern Chinese society.
A study of the tensions between region and nation in Republican China. Diana Lary gives a detailed examination of Kwangsi province in south-west China, the home base of a major warlord clique that was important both for its interesting internal politics and for its national influence in the late 1920s and the 1930s. She reconstructs with imagination and thoroughness the intricate political and military history of the nation, but without losing sight of the overall regional character of the Kwangsi government and its policies. She shows how the regional leaders responded to central breakdown, what sense they had of the nation even in its weakened condition. China is usually studied as a monolithic entity; Diana Lary demonstrates that such a simple view must fail, that China also consists of a large number of distinct regions with special patterns of relationship to the centre.
Larry (emerita, history, U. of British Columbia, Canada) presents 13 essays that explore different facets the millennia-long relationship between Chinese central authorities and the Chinese borderland
The People's Republic of China claims 22,000 kilometres of land borders and 18,000 kilometres of coast line. How did this vast country come into being? The state credo describes an ancient process of
Throughout its modern history China has suffered from immense destruction and loss of life from warfare. In its worst periods of warfare, the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), millions o
Examining the consequences of warfare, as they are still felt by contemporary China, these seven essays describe wartime atrocities in Xuzhou, collaboration with the Japanese occupation in Jiading, an
The underlying notion here is that whereas other tensions in Asia are likely to be resolved in time, the economic rivalry between China and Japan will probably intensify over the decades; and how the
Negotiating China's Destiny explains how China developed from a country that hardly mattered internationally into the important world power it is today. Before World War II, China had suffered through
