Since the mid-fifteenth century, the enrolment of the Ming Imperial Academy had kept increasing and the Confucian students eligible for official appointments had far outnumbered the vacancies with the bureaucracy. Despite oppositions to the seniority system in making official appointments in Chinese history from the fourth century onwards as Qiu Jun adduces texts to show, he proposed that it was crucial for the Ming emperor to adopt such a system for the fairness of selection on the grounds that the problem of too many candidates for too few offices needed to be resolved and that historical circumstances required changes in institutions rather than a strict adherence to received historical wisdom.

This chapter examines the military and economic centrality of granary networks to the Nationalists’ war effort. The centralization of land tax and its collection in kind restored the granary’s historic importance as the storehouse of state wealth. However, the chapter moves away from the dominant portrayal of granaries as economic stabilizers and disaster relief mechanisms to emphasize their strategic significance for an agrarian state at war. In examining the government’s establishment of a national grain reserve scheme and its construction of granary networks throughout its territories, the chapter presents the granary as an integral part of wartime economic policy and military logistical organization. It also studies the amassing of grain reserves in southwestern Yunnan for the Chinese Expeditionary Force after the fall of Burma, a significant but forgotten effort. Unlike most studies, it pays close attention to day-to-day operations, such as checking the quality of delivered grain and preventing spoilage. These everyday procedures are a window into how the demands of war concretely shaped civilian life and illustrate that granaries were key sites of state-society interaction.

The chapter examines the Yangzi as the only inland river system that played a consistent major role in strategy during World War II. It was only in China, where protracted war was waged without a nationwide network of railways, that riverine operations emerged as the pivot of military decision-making. As China’s principal waterway, the Yangtze was not only key to the projection of military power into the hinterland, but also – and more importantly – a vital channel for transporting grain to both Chinese and Japanese armies as they endured prolonged conflict. The chapter begins at the Japanese-occupied Yangzi Delta, demonstrating how the delta became central to the China Expeditionary Army’s efforts to live off the land. It then moves upriver to highlight the understudied Battle of Yichang of mid-1940 as a turning point in the war because of its repercussions for provisioning. The Nationalist loss of Yichang severed their Sichuan base from the traditional grain-producing regions of central and east China and forced a rewriting of military provisioning policies.

This chapter highlights how low-level tussles for food replaced large-scale engagements as the main mode of conflict among the Nationalists, CCP, and Japanese. In regions of military contestation, namely guerrilla war zones, civilians participated extensively in two endeavors common to all sides: procurement (acquiring grain) and protection (ensuring that grain did not fall into enemy hands). All three main belligerents attempted to control the flow of grain across ambiguous boundaries through blockades and the rush-transportation and rush-purchase of food. These practices dominated everyday civilian life and were invariably laced with violence. The daily threat of food-related bloodshed forced most ordinary Chinese to go to drastic lengths to survive the protracted three-way struggle. Such grim prospects reveal the limitations of nationalism and collaborationism as explanations for wartime behavior, even though Nationalist and CCP propaganda weaponized the “hanjian” label against each other. The moralization of collaboration and resistance in both scholarly work and popular memory has overshadowed the mundaneness of survival.

The book examines Nationalist China’s military provisioning strategies during its war against Japan, from procurement and storage to transportation and seizure from the enemy, to make two broader points. Firstly, the conflict shows that the historical concept of total war should not be confined to modern technology as a means or to rapid victory as an end. Chinese thinkers christened their struggle against Japan a “total war,” but held a different vision of totality to accommodate China’s premodern resource base and commitment to protracted warfare. Secondly, logistics deserves more attention not just among military historians, but among all scholars of war. Its technicalities are a crucial window into the everyday experiences of ordinary actors who have been marginalized in historical scholarship.