Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern China

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

Few nations have suffered losses equal to those endured by China in the
century between 1850 and 1950. Beginning with the great Taiping
Rebellion of the mid-19th century, war became a dominant feature of
Chinese life until the Communist victory in 1949, which brought national
unification and peace to a ravaged land. During these same hundred
years, China endured three wars of foreign aggression (the Anti-Japanese
War of 1894–95, the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, and the Russo–Japanese
War of 1904–05), revolutionary violence attending the fall of the Qing
Dynasty in 1911, bloody regional conflicts of the 1910s and 1920s fought
by war-lord armies, and sputtering civil war between nationalists and
communists during the 1920s and 1930s.

This cycle of violence lurched into its most terrifying phase in 1937
with the Japanese invasion. It is the psychological and social impact of
eight years of war on an already brutalized population that concerns the
contributors to this insightful collection of essays edited by Diana
Lary and Stephen MacKinnon. The contributors suggest striking parallels
with more contemporary—and better known—instances of civil strife
and incessant violence in the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, and
Republican China. All of them make convincing arguments that the true
impact of war is only understandable at a micro-societal and personal
level. Well-known incidents, such as the horrific atrocities in Nanjing
during the winter of 1937–38, are re-evaluated not from the victims’
perspective but from the viewpoint of Japanese commanders, many of whom
deplored the maniacal violence. As a truly modern war that brought the
first sustained aerial bombardment of civilian targets, the Japanese
invasion displaced millions of urban and rural Chinese. The
psychological damages inflicted by decades of violence left permanent
scars, most notably a pervasive fear of chaos that became part of
China’s political culture. When students and workers confronted
China’s elderly leadership in 1989, memories of these 50-year-old
upheavals prompted them to act decisively—and violently—to preserve
order at the cost of innocent lives.

This is a valuable book whose contributors offer case studies of war
and its impact on China’s collective memory and consciousness. As
such, it offers important insights into the devastating costs, both
social and psychological, of chronic warfare and civil unrest not just
in China, but in other locales (such as the West Bank or Afghanistan)
where peace remains elusive.