Why study China's wartime 20th century

China does not remember war the way the West does.

For China, war is not an event. It is a condition.

The twentieth century did not arrive there with optimism or industry. It arrived with invasion, starvation, and a country already tearing itself apart. Japan did not interrupt a civil war. It poured gasoline on one that was already burning. And when the foreign enemy finally left, the killing simply changed direction.

This is the part that gets smoothed over. Sanitized. Labeled as separate conflicts to make the story easier to digest. But on the ground, there was no pause. No reset. Just an unbroken stretch of violence where enemies overlapped, alliances lied, and survival mattered more than ideology.

Nationalists fought Japanese troops while quietly preparing to fight Communists. Communists fought Japanese units while conserving strength for the real war they knew was coming. Warlords hedged. Civilians paid. History was decided by who could bleed the longest without breaking.

Out of this chaos came modern China. Suspicious of weakness. Obsessed with unity. Intolerant of disorder. A state that learned, the hard way, that fragmentation invites annihilation and memory is a weapon.

Nanjing. Yan’an. Chongqing. The Long March. None of them stand alone. Together they explain why power in China is centralized, why dissent is feared, and why history is guarded like a loaded gun.

This is not a story about heroism. It is a story about endurance, brutality, and the price of survival.

If you want to understand China today, you do not start with economics or diplomacy.

You start here, in the war that never stopped.

Today’s guest is one of the heavyweights. Hans van de Ven is a historian who went looking for China’s twentieth century where it actually lived. Not in slogans. Not in memoirs polished for export. In the archives, the war rooms, the bureaucratic back alleys of a country tearing itself apart.

Trained at Leiden and Harvard, now a professor at Cambridge, he’s spent his career dismantling the myths around China’s wars from 1937 through the end of the Korean War. His work on the Chinese Communist Party and China’s war against Japan rewired how historians understand power, violence, and survival in modern Asia.

You might know his books From Friend to Comrade or China at War, works that refuse to romanticize revolution and insist on treating war as it actually was.

These days, he’s still at it, pushing Chinese history back into the center of global war narratives where it belongs. This is not armchair history. This is history with scars. This is Hans van de Ven.

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