Building a Nation at War

J. Megan Greene intends Building a Nation at War to reinforce an important corrective: the oft-told story of China's economic development does not start in 1978, leaping out of Deng Xiaoping's head like Athena from Zeus. Nor does it begin in 1949 with Mao Zedong's founding of the People's Republic of China as a laboratory for his vision of “revolution and construction.” Instead, Greene wants to push the chronology of China's development back across the 1949 line that bisects the historiography of twentieth-century China. Her vehicle for doing so is an in-depth study of “transnational knowledge networks” during the 1940s. More specifically, she examines World War II–era collaboration between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government and a variety of Americans (with a smaller cast of Brits) designed to enhance China's “human resources” in science, technology, agriculture, and industry. Having scoured archives in Taiwan, mainland China, England, and the United States, Greene sets out to document the full picture of “Sino-American wartime technical engagement” (xi).Building a Nation at War surfaces two underlying tensions at work beneath the veneer of allied cooperation. First, there was a gap in motivation. US officials had a short-term focus on doing whatever helped defeat Japan, with private sector Americans bringing the added motivation of positioning themselves to profit from postwar conditions. Chinese actors, by contrast, were motived by a wider desire to modernize the scientific, technological, and industrial underpinnings of their economy. For Nationalist Party officials and Chinese trainees, transnational collaboration was part of a nation-building effort that transcended the immediate exigencies of the war against Japan, even as its success was contingent on victory in that conflict.A secondary tension explored by Greene is more sociological in nature. Americans approached the wartime “knowledge network” as a one-way, top-down transmission from advanced donor country (the United States) to backward, needy recipient (China). Greene astutely points out evidence from American advisers’ own sources indicating the ways in which they learned from Chinese interlocutors without puncturing their sense of national (if not civilizational) superiority. Chinese Americans and Chinese in America played a significant intermediary role in facilitating the work of knowledge networks, demonstrating a subtler understanding of the two-way nature of the process.Although not included in the title, Building a Nation at War is illuminating in exploring how wartime contingencies forced a radical shift in the geography of international cooperation from coastal China to the hinterland. Chiang Kai-shek's dilemmas in relocating his developmental state deep into the southwest are laid bare in Greene's description of the shortage of roads, trucks, and fuel that bedeviled efforts to increase industrial productivity, for example. Greene concludes, however, that this wartime transformation proved ephemeral—almost as soon as Japan surrendered, Chiang and his American partners shifted attention back to the familiar territory of former treaty ports along with ex-Japanese colonies in Manchuria and Taiwan. Indeed, her contention in the introduction that “wartimes modes of planning, training, and transnational technical engagement served as the foundation of the postwar period in China and Taiwan” (17) seems not entirely borne out by the end of the book—at least in terms of the PRC. Greene herself offers ample evidence of discontinuity after 1945. Her evidence for long-term impacts on “Taiwan's developmental state” (247–53), the subject of her previous book, is more persuasive.Greene moves nimbly between social and institutional history, profiling trainers and trainees while also examining the institutional infrastructure—governmental and private—that made their interactions possible. Her comparative case study of the China Industrial Cooperatives (spearheaded by left-leaning “friends of China” like Rewi Alley and Edgar Snow), the US State Department's Division of Cultural Relations, and the Sino-British Science Cooperation office (run by Joseph Needham) makes for fascinating reading, particularly when Anglo-American competition is made explicit in the primary sources.Greene's source basis is varied and extensive; she has clearly done a lot of digging through understudied material, allowing her to document the personal experiences and institutional evolution of US-China scientific and technical collaboration during WWII. This strength can become a weakness, at least for readers interested in the bigger picture. The story and analysis sag at points under the weight of direct quotation from research reports, trainee letters, and trainer memoirs. Building a Nation at War features a large cast of minor characters, and it might have been helpful to weave certain key figures—Wen Wenghao and Donald Nelson, for example—across the fabric of the book as a whole. As it stands, Building a Nation at War will be profitably read by researchers with interests in wartime China, in the regional history of the southwest, and in relations between the United States and Republic of China

Ancient history · China · Development economics · Economics · Political science · World War II · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Law

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