Introduction / James Flath and Norman Smithġ Writing andRemembering the Battle against Opiates in Manchukuo / NormanSmithĢ War,Schools, China, Hong Kong: 1937-49 / Bernard Hung-kay Lukģ BombsDon’t Discriminate? Class, Gender, and Ethnicity in theAir-Raid-Shelter Experiences of the Wartime Chongqing Population / Chang Jui-teĤ Militarization and Jinmen (Quemoy) Society, 1949-92 / MichaelSzonyiĥ TheBlagoveshchensk Massacre of 1900: The Sino-Russian War and GlobalImperialism / Victor ZatsepineĦ Victims andVictimizers: Warlord Soldiers and Mutinies in Republican China / Edward A. Lastly, Part 3, “Memory andRepresentation,” examines the various media, monuments, andsocial controls by which war has been memorialized.Īlthough many of the conflicts described in BeyondSuffering barely registered against the sweeping backdrop ofChinese history, such conflicts bring us closer to understanding war,militarism, and suffering in modern China. Thechapters in Part 1, “Society at War,” reveal how war andmilitarization can both structure and destabilize society, while thosein Part 2, “Institutional Engagement,” show howinstitutions and the people they represent can become pawns in largerpower struggles. Though accounts ofwar-inflicted suffering are often fragmented or politically motivated,the authors show that they are crucial to understanding the multiplefronts on which wars are fought, experienced, and remembered. In Beyond Suffering, a distinguished group of historians ofmodern China look beyond the geopolitical aspects of war to explore itssocial, institutional, and cultural dimensions, from child rearing andeducation to massacres and warlord mutinies.

Yet there has never beenclear understanding of how wartime suffering defined the nation andshaped its people. China was afflicted by a brutal succession of conflicts through muchof the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Warlord Soldiers by Diana Lary