In October 1944, the US Consul General at Kunming, William Langdon, reported to Secretary of State Cordell Hull that the crux of the Chinese war effort against Japan was not a matter of steel, but of food. “The impartial Chinese observer,” he declared, “is aware that the fundamental causes of China’s military weakness and reverses go deeper than a mere lack of military equipment.” Rather, according to one “influential and well-placed Chinese” who addressed the Consulate, “in the military field … in order of importance, came food for the soldiers … last of all, modern weapons.”Footnote ¹ Langdon was not alone among foreign observers who believed Chinese soldiers were often in direr need of nourishment than they were of arms. “The maintenance of the present [strategic] situation seems to depend more on the crop prospects than on anything else,” the British Embassy in Chongqing reported in the same year.Footnote ² Sir Horace Seymour, British Ambassador to China, concluded that “crops and food supplies [are] … the most important element in the morale of the Chinese people at the present stage of the war.”Footnote ³

This book examines the military institutions that supplied grain, the staple of both Chinese and Japanese diets, to the armies of the Nationalist government during China’s war against Japan (1937–45). Here, I draw from David Robinson’s definition of “military institutions” as state organizations or programs that engage broad swathes of society in the process of mobilizing for war.Footnote ⁴ I trace military provisioning processes from the point of collection through to distribution to army consumers. Importantly, instead of only studying these two endpoints, I also explore everything that transpired in between: transportation, storage, and the protection of foodstuffs from enemy seizure. In bringing the movement of grain to the foreground – rather than wartime agricultural productivity or the politics of food allocation – the book is concerned with logistics in its truest sense: with the “lifeblood of war.”Footnote ⁵

Grains of Conflict demonstrates that the war against Japan was, at its heart, as much a contest for food as one of military conscription or firepower. The Chinese themselves – both Nationalist and Communist – made regular references to “the war of struggling for grain” (zhengliang zhanzheng 爭糧戰爭), “the war of seizing grain” (qiangliang zhanzheng 搶糧戰爭), and “the struggle to protect grain” (baoliang douzheng 保糧鬥爭). Their heightened sensitivity to the question of sustenance stemmed from the prolonged nature of the conflict. Chiang and other military thinkers had already foreseen the protraction of a war against Japan in the 1930s; in fact, by 1935, protracted warfare against Japan had become the basis of its National Defense Plan, and Sichuan identified a potential haven for retreat.Footnote ⁶ The Japanese, on their part, hoped for the quick annihilation of the Chinese government. But after Chiang escaped their grasp – first at Nanjing and then at Wuhan – and regrouped in Chongqing, the Japanese were also forced to relinquish such hope. They, too, turned to the lengthy project of establishing a rival political regime. Thus, apart from its first and final years, much of the war was mired in a state of suspension. In their bid to outlast each other, for all sides the acquisition of food – rather than the annihilation of enemy forces – became an overriding concern.

This is not to say that battlefield clashes stopped altogether. According to He Yingqin (何應欽 1890–1987), Chiang Kai-shek’s Chief of Staff, over eight years the Nationalists embarked on 22 campaigns and offensives and around 1,117 battles of note.Footnote ⁷ He was himself convinced that conscription – his chief responsibility – was the linchpin of the war effort.Footnote ⁸ But between 1938 and 1944, few of these engagements resulted in substantial changes in territory. Several of the Nationalists’ most pressing problems were in direct relation to how to feed rather than simply to enlist men: agricultural production, grain market fluctuations, economic blockades, tax revenue, and transport systems. Some major clashes, such as the repeated Battles of Changsha or the Battle of South Guangxi, were themselves initiated by the Japanese with a view to seize key supply lines or transshipment points in order to strangle the Nationalists. As the war dragged on, both the Chinese and Japanese grew preoccupied with the immense provisioning demands of maintaining long-term military postures.

Indeed, the seeming banality of foodstuffs – as opposed to the glory of combat – belies the drama of the Sino-Japanese competition for resources. The Nationalists faced ever deteriorating strategic circumstances. The fall of Nanning in 1939 severed a supply line to Vietnam. The loss of the strategic transshipment point of Yichang, in Hubei province, cut the Nationalists off from the traditional grain baskets of central and eastern China. By 1942, a tightened Japanese embargo and the occupation of Burma had plunged Nationalist China into a “fundamental logistical nightmare.”Footnote ⁹ Although abundant, Chinese resources were finite. Ravaged by conflict and by a series of natural disasters in the early 1940s, China could hardly support long-term Chinese military mobilization, let alone a foreign army, which numbered more than a million soldiers at its height. The Nationalist soldier’s diet comprised almost entirely of carbohydrates – derived from grain – and vegetables, with virtually no source of animal protein. The standard grain ration throughout the war remained between 22 and 24 liang (兩), or between 700 and 800 grams of rice, although flour and wheat were also occasionally distributed.Footnote ¹⁰ Often, if the soldier received no grain, he ate nothing at all. As for the Imperial Japanese Army, the outbreak of the Pacific War meant that it could no longer depend on the home islands and colonies for long-term provisions. There emerged in China “one of the most unusual supply situations for a modern fighting force in the war – large armies providing for themselves.”Footnote ¹¹ Thus, all sides were forced to vie for a dwindling pool of sustenance. Securing grain was the linchpin of both long-term occupation and resistance.

Grains of Conflict explores how, against these odds, the Nationalists enacted vital systems of grain procurement, storage, and transportation to maintain a force of around five million soldiers. Away from the cities in the east, such as Shanghai and the bustling capital of Chongqing, much of China’s interior was still defined by an agrarian society and premodern infrastructure. These two features – protraction and an agrarian society – defined Chinese strategy against Japan. The combination forced the Nationalist government to make the most of their richest resource: the vast Chinese population still under their control. Grain provisioning systems came to rest on the systematic extraction of civilian resources at the most localized levels of society. The Nationalists commandeered land, buildings, ships, boats, pack animals, and labor force to construct and operate thousands of miles of grain supply lines. Storage and transport networks connected civilian homes to military sites, enmeshing civilian and combatant spheres. In areas straddling free/occupied borders, Nationalist, Communist, and Japanese authorities (and the Japanese-controlled Reorganized National Government, hereafter RNG) all relied on civilians to seize or stash away foodstuffs. Much of guerrilla activity in these contested zones revolved around grain; constant, simmering violence invaded individual households and permeated everyday life. In this way, civilian communities were as important as the armed forces in keeping China in the long war.

Telling this story yields lessons not just for modern Chinese history, but also for understandings of World War II. In the past decade, scholars have zeroed in on the centrality of food to the unfolding of the global conflict.Footnote ¹² Visions of an agrarian utopia fueled the Nazi regime and Japanese empire; consequently, shortage, rationing, and starvation defined the daily lives of most populations. “Throughout the mechanized total wars of the twentieth century,” Heather Merle Benbow and Heather R. Perry argue, “Germany’s defeat ultimately hinged more upon the nation’s agricultural resources and food supplies than its military might or prowess.”Footnote ¹³ At least 20 million people died globally from starvation and associated diseases.Footnote ¹⁴ China remains disconnected from these discussions of wartime food security. Even to the literature centered on the Pacific, the China theatre often appears as a mere appendage. Instead, attention is funneled into Japan’s search for autarky and its extractive machinations in its short-lived Southeast Asian colonies.Footnote ¹⁵

Including China in the overarching narrative of World War II requires a delicate balance between recognizing commonalities with other belligerents and identifying areas of exception. Of course, hunger and starvation were common experiences throughout Asia and the rest of the world; China’s tale of suffering was but one of many. In particular, China shared many strategic similarities with the Soviet Union. Faced also with an invasion and a mass evacuation from one end of the country to the other (in China, east to west; in the Soviet Union, west to east), Stalin’s state “assumed the height of its massive mobilizing power,” instituting an exhaustive mobilization program to meet these exigencies.Footnote ¹⁶ But Soviet provisioning took place under conditions very different than those in China, and so assumed different forms. The Stalinist socialist state wielded much more centralized power than did Chiang Kai-shek’s regime; there remained a significant industrial sector; Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union was much more substantial and included four million tons of food; and the strategic map shifted rapidly in comparison to China’s stalemate.

China faced protraction, a weak central government confronted with two rival regimes, an agrarian constitution, and an unrelenting blockade. Food-related endeavors were shaped by the sum of these factors. For one, the Soviet Union and most other major belligerents implemented nationwide rationing systems. Such an undertaking was impossible for China. It devoted its energies to meet the quotas set for the fighting man’s daily grain consumption, did its best to provide for its civil servants and teachers, and left civilians to fend for themselves. For another, Chinese provisioning processes were written as blueprints for long-term army presences throughout the provinces, rather than as ad hoc responses to surges of movement. At the same time that Chinese leaders saw their struggle as an integral part of the global conflict, they were also aware that their particular conditions distinguished China from other major theaters of war. China’s place in World War II studies, therefore, is rooted not only in its entanglements with the Allies, but also from the circumstances that gave rise to its exceptional approaches to provisioning. The story told here focuses on developments within China, but its implications are global.

China against the Odds

The Chinese government’s use of civilian resources must help to explain the “incontrovertible” fact that has long preoccupied scholars of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, including those of an earlier generation who were unsympathetic to its rule: that, despite everything, it ensured China’s survival and won the war.Footnote ¹⁷

The Nationalists have not always been the protagonists of this story. In the decades following World War II, much of the English-language scholarship on China’s war against Japan was preoccupied with rationalizing the momentous CCP victory of 1949, reading history backward to search for the origins of the CCP’s revolution in its wartime endeavors.Footnote ¹⁸ As Rana Mitter has pointed out, this trend underwent a quiet reversal in the 1980s, as attention turned instead to the Nationalists.Footnote ¹⁹ Initial assessments of the Nationalists, however, lambasted them for their corruption, ineptitude, and callous disregard for their own citizenry – products of scathing observations by General Joseph Stilwell (1883–1946), Chiang’s US military advisor, and influential American journalists such as Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby. In one of the benchmark indictments of Chiang’s wartime regime, Lloyd Eastman argued that the Nationalists planted the “seeds of [their own] destruction” during the war by failing to control inflation, curb corruption, and rein in the ruthless exploitation of the Chinese populace through its tax regimes.Footnote ²⁰ Just as with the CCP’s victory, so the roots of the Nationalists’ defeat sprawled backward in time to the middling war period, for it was then that they irrevocably lost the support of both rural and urban bases.

But even a review of Eastman pointed out that the Nationalists minimally deserved credit for the “preservation of sovereign China.”Footnote ²¹ In 1992, Ch’i Hsi-sheng concluded that, despite controversies over the Nationalists’ commitment to the prosecution of war and the soundness of their judgments, China had proven to be a “formidable foe.” “The Second Sino-Japanese War lasted 97 months,” he pointed out, “longer than the sum total of all wars China had ever fought on its own soil against foreign invaders since the beginning of the 19th century,” and yet the nation had “persevered to the bitter end.”Footnote ²² The image of the Nationalists as “virtually moribund,” as Eastman would have it, has since undergone a cautious reappraisal.Footnote ²³ Indeed, there has been a new willingness to take seriously the Nationalist government-in-exile’s “increasingly mature” programs of state-building and state welfare.Footnote ²⁴ These studies challenge the earlier treatment of the war as an irrevocable disruption of state-building processes, viewing it instead as a catalyst for key state functions.Footnote ²⁵

The book also moves away from unequivocal condemnation of the Nationalist government to consider, instead, how it performed the key function of provisioning its armed forces. This is by no means to dismiss charges of corruption, disorganization, and exploitation; much of the book examines precisely these problems at various levels of decision-making. But focusing on the government’s failures does not help to explain the “incontrovertible” fact of its survival. Rather, the explanation lies in what it did manage to do in spite of its significant flaws. The book therefore takes the government’s provisioning policies seriously as a remarkable feat of mass mobilization throughout unoccupied China. By the same token, however, it also acknowledges that these policies were founded upon an overriding state commitment to civilian sacrifice. To muster up the resources it needed – which was everything – the government bled dry a population already struggling with hostilities, inflation, and military conscription. Programs to protect people from indigence, disaster, and disease in select areas of the interior stood in contrast to nationwide programs of mobilization that thrust lives and livelihoods on the line.

This study makes regular references to CCP provisioning methods and highlights the importance of grain to their overall strategy against the Japanese. It does not, however, offer a detailed comparative analysis. Nor do I compare grain policies in order to determine how or whether Chiang Kai-shek lost China, and Mao Zedong won China, during the war against Japan – which, in effect, would be to allow the specter of 1949 to dictate the storytelling. As Rana Mitter and Aaron William Moore have aptly put it, the Nationalist state must be understood with reference to its CCP rival, but not merely as an “unchanging or backward foil” to CCP radicalism.Footnote ²⁶ In the first place, it is not possible to draw a direct comparison between Nationalist and Communist wartime performances. Political incumbent and challenger faced different sets of challenges. Yang Kuisong has rightly observed that the CCP conducted their war using a radically different rationale. They were less concerned with holding territory, and could better afford to channel their energies into building political foundations at the grassroots level.Footnote ²⁷ In contrast, as the formal, recognized government of China, the Nationalists had to contend with a much wider array of state responsibilities, and their resources were stretched much thinner. Grain policies in CCP-controlled regions were also rendered in the language of class struggle, and were part of a broader revolutionary program of land and other reforms. I do not, therefore, assess which set of grain policies was “better” than the other, for such policies were conceived and implemented in different settings.

Instead, I explore CCP grain-related practices specifically to illustrate two things. While the Nationalists and CCP operated under different political and strategic conditions, they were both faced with the same material circumstances. Thus, for all their mutual animosity, the government and CCP in fact shared key commonalities in their provisioning methods.Footnote ²⁸ In particular, both relied heavily on local civilian mobilization and on uneasy working relationships with existing local units of administration, such as the baojia. Secondly, grain emerged as a central theme in Nationalist and CCP propaganda, especially in opposition to each other once the Second United Front disintegrated in January 1941. While at the start of the war, the United Front had manifested itself in the government provision of provisions, including food, to nine CCP divisions, the January Fourth (or Southern Anhui) Incident instigated civil war between the two rivals, reshaping the struggle for food into a three-way tussle.Footnote ²⁹ As Nationalist-CCP relations spiraled into open enmity, both sides accused each other of exploiting Chinese civilians for their produce and labor while extolling the benevolence and effectiveness of their own policies. Civilians were drawn to whichever regime seemed to offer the best prospects for food security while demanding the least sacrifice. But food security was a central theme in Nationalist, CCP and Japanese portrayals of themselves and each other, as well as a principal factor in decision-making for much of China’s populace.

Thus the book discusses Nationalist-CCP rivalry as an aspect of China’s wartime struggle for food, and not the other way round (food as one part of an overarching narrative about Nationalist-CCP rivalry). It is principally a study of how the Chinese government defeated the odds to preserve China’s sovereignty – and how, as I have argued before, crediting the Nationalists for this also means holding them accountable for the prices they chose to pay.Footnote ³⁰

China’s Total War

More than any other endeavor during China’s war, army provisioning underscored the integration of civilian effort into military institutions and the state’s empowerment to commandeer virtually all resources. For this reason, I consider China’s war against Japan a total war. After all, in its original conception after World War I, total war represented the state’s total power to mobilize all the nation’s resources and the end to all private life. The Military Requisition Law and National Total Mobilization Law – explored in subsequent chapters – legally solidified the Nationalist government’s right to take whatever it needed from its population. I am by no means alone in this judgment: Many historians of the war and of modern China describe the Chinese effort in terms of total war, albeit often in passing.Footnote ³¹ Hans van de Ven notes that both Japanese and Nationalist governments mobilized all the resources necessary for “what was thought of as total war, in which mass was everything.”Footnote ³² Brian Tsui highlights how total war “expected citizens to contribute consistently to the resistance at work and play … and to submit to authority,” “delegitimizing class politics and micro-managing individual lives.” In this way, Tsui argues, the war experience was “a radicalization of the [Nationalists’] conservative revolution.”Footnote ³³

Yet, China is virtually absent from broader global discussions of the total war concept. The current benchmark study, Roger Chickering and Stig Förster’s edited series, makes no mention of China in its final volume on World War II. The omission stems at least partially from the more general tendency to exclude China from studies of World War II, which historians consider the paradigmatic case of total war (although Rana Mitter’s Forgotten Ally has gone some way in rectifying this exclusion).Footnote ³⁴

The China theater deserves a prominent position in the discourse on total war for two reasons. Firstly, Chinese strategists were themselves vigilant observers of developments in Europe and consciously shaped their preparations for an eventual clash with Japan through the lens of total war. Many staple descriptions of the struggle against Japan in the 1930s and 1940s reflected this. Most frequent in appearance was quanmian kangzhan (全面抗戰), “all-out war of resistance,” or quanmian zhanzheng (全面戰爭), “all-out war”; minzu zhanzheng and minzu kangzhan (民族戰爭, 民族抗戰), or “people’s war,” particularly in the context of Communist writing; and quantixing zhanzheng (全體性戰爭) and zongti zhanzheng (總體戰爭). The latter two were often direct translations of the contemporary English and German terms “total war” and “totale Krieg.” However, all of the aforementioned terms were explicit or implied references to the post-World War I concept of total war. Many observers paid homage to Erich Ludendorff’s Der totale Krieg, published in 1935 as an impassioned reflection on Germany’s defeat. “‘All-out war’ (quanmian zhanzheng) is a legacy of the war in Europe,” declared Bai Chongxi (白崇禧 1893–1966), Chiang Kai-shek’s Vice-Chief of the General Staff, in a speech in 1938. Because of industrial advancement, “the war came to encompass political, economic, and cultural spheres – in other words, it affected the lives of the belligerents’ peoples in their entirety, both materially and spiritually.”Footnote ³⁵ Bai carried on to quote Ludendorff: “the objective of ‘total war’ (quantixing zhanzheng) is the continued survival of the people.” By this definition, China’s war against Japanese aggression was undoubtedly a total war – “all the people” are “hanging by a thread.”Footnote ³⁶ Jiang Baili (蔣百里 1882–1938), one of Republican China’s renown strategic thinkers, also reflected total war thinking in his writings on the eve of and after the outbreak of war. Born in Zhejiang (as was Chiang Kai-shek), a graduate of the Japanese Imperial Army Academy, and once the principal of the Baoding Military Academy, Jiang Baili visited Europe on multiple occasions in the 1910s and 1930s. He was familiar with the writings of Carl von Clausewitz, Giulio Douhet, and Erich Ludendorff, and established connections with and learned from peers in Germany.Footnote ³⁷ By the 1930s, he, too, had located the heart of China’s national defense in economic mobilization (guofang jingjixue 國防經濟學).Footnote ³⁸ Therefore, China’s strategic thinkers were strongly attuned to trends in global interwar strategic thinking. Just as much as European, Soviet, and American projections of future conflict, Chinese projections of their clash with Japan were defined by visions of total war.

However, once again, Chinese strategists were cognizant that China was a special case. This is the second reason for its inclusion: The China theater offers a unique perspective to our understanding of total war because of the merging of its agrarian society with the doctrine of protraction shared by all sides. In the minds of Chinese thinkers, these two factors were in fact closely linked. Jiang Baili argued that there were three factors of national strength: manpower, materiel, and organization. The last of these referred to the capacity to make use of the first two resources. The United States had all three; Japan, the Soviet Union, and much of Europe had work forces and organization but not material resources; China had people and materiel, but lacked organization, or the means to mobilize the nation.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong constantly reiterated that China’s vast territory and rich resources – dida wubo (地大物博) was a shared favorite idiom – would make up for its technological and industrial inferiority. China and Japan were diametric opposites, Mao Zedong wrote in his treatise On Protracted Warfare (Lun chijiuzhan 論持久戰). China had the population, resources, and land to last, global sentiment was in its favor and not Japan’s, and it was on the cusp of (Communist) revolution. Protracted conflict would not only blunt Japan’s advantages as an industrial nation, but would also set China on the path to righteous victory.Footnote ⁴⁰ Chiang Kai-shek often spoke of “protracted war” and “total war” in the same breath. In October 1938, as the Japanese overran Wuhan, he emphasized to the nation that the key to victory lay not in the gain or loss of a single point of territory, but in their ability to sustain a long fight and to expand “total war” (quanmian zhanzheng) throughout China.Footnote ⁴¹ In April 1940, he told the National Political Council that China’s economy was “naturally” better suited for a war of attrition than its industrialized counterparts.Footnote ⁴² Thus, China’s agrarian economy both necessitated and enabled its commitment to prolonged conflict. Denying Japan any chance to annihilate its armies on the battlefield meant that it could capitalize instead on its land and people.

Yet, the agrarian-protracted combination may itself be another explanation for China’s exclusion from total war discourse. There remains a predominant image of total war as modern, as one of munitions, tanks, trucks, airplanes, and submarines. Scholars have noted that total war is not necessarily modernized war. “Total war need not be modern,” Hew Strachan warns, and “a modern war need not be total.”Footnote ⁴³ Chickering notes that assumed link between modernization and total war does not always stand up to scrutiny.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet, the historiography on total war still implies this conflation, revolving principally around the experiences of industrial belligerents such as Germany, Britain, France, the United States, the Soviet Union (and, occasionally, Japan) during and in between the two world wars.

The emphasis on the first half of the twentieth century is historical. After all, total war was an intellectual product of the interwar period. The term entered strategic lexicons when the survivors of World War I tried to find a way of war that would prevent a repeat of the ordeal. In particular, as John Buckley has shown, airpower – which made its debut at the Battle of Verdun – both caused and accelerated the theory and practice of total war.Footnote ⁴⁵ Aside from the economic mobilization required to build an air force, airpower also embodied the deliberate targeting of civilian populations, a defining strand of total war. Giulio Douhet offered in 1921 a terrifying vision: airplanes, virtually unopposed in the “third dimension” (the air), wreaking such sudden devastation on enemy cities that it caused the “collapse of all social organization.” The “decisive blow,” he announced, “will be directed at civilians, that element of the countries at war least able to sustain [war].”Footnote ⁴⁶ It was not the material damage that would force capitulation, but its effects on civilian morale. Similarly, Liddell Hart recognized that both the tank and the airplane enabled belligerents to leapfrog over armies and strike directly at the seat of enemy will.Footnote ⁴⁷ Thus, in Richard Overy’s words, “the thresholds crossed in the First World War proved impossible to reverse.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The crossing of thresholds was intertwined with another strand of thought: a renewed search for a rapid victory that would spare belligerents the devastation of World War I. Both Douhet and Liddell Hart hoped that the mere prospect of an aerial knock-out blow would prevent hostilities in the first place. “Where air equality existed between the rival nations,” Liddell Hart remarked, “and each was as politically and industrially vulnerable, it is possible that either would hesitate to employ the air attack for fear of instant retaliation.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Thus, in the long shadow of World War I, historical actors themselves assumed that total war was modern war. Imperial Japan, China’s adversary, drew lessons from the cautionary German tale, recognizing the necessity of an industrial base and large-scale economic mobilization for future warfare.Footnote ⁵⁰ It also paid close attention to interwar discussions about airpower and civilian morale, and brought their observations to bear in China by aerially bombarding its cities once war broke out.Footnote ⁵¹ Thus, Chinese civilians joined Ethiopians and Spaniards as among the world’s first victims of Douhetian imagination. The enduring conflation of “total” and “modern,” Strachan argues, is the “conceptual legacy” of these mid-twentieth-century discourses.Footnote ⁵²

The China theater demonstrates that total war should not have to be married either to modern technology as a means, or to rapid victory as an end. Chinese strategists saw no contradiction in welding their own total war to agrarian resources and a protracted timeline, even while drawing extensively on European conceptions to shape their thinking. By Chinese design, the crux of China’s war effort lay not in the deployment of modern weaponry against enemy forces, but in the ability to feed its own standing armies for a long period of time until conditions became suitable for a counteroffensive. This ability hinged on the intensive use of preindustrial resources. And “the less developed a belligerent’s economy, the more thorough (or total) must be its effort.”Footnote ⁵³

This is not to say that the China theater saw no modern warfare at all. Tanks rolled through the streets of Shanghai, Japanese Mitsubishi G3M bombers terrorized Chongqing, and, particularly with the entry of the United States into the war, airplanes and trucks appeared in substantial numbers in the southwestern provinces. Neither is it to claim that other armies elsewhere were fully mechanized, or that non-industrial endeavors did not feature in their war efforts. The Soviet Red Army, too, occasionally used porter commands of local civilians to support regimental transport, and the Wehrmacht forced Soviet defectors or prisoners of war into transport labor.Footnote ⁵⁴ Both made substantial use of horses for transportation.Footnote ⁵⁵ But the decimation of Chiang Kai-shek’s best-equipped divisions in the opening months of the war, the meagerness of the Chinese air force, and most importantly, the avoidance of large-scale engagements on all sides, diminished the significance of modern weaponry and equipment to the overall war effort. To keep in the war of attrition, China relied on nonmechanized, nonindustrial methods to grow, collect, transport and store military provisions to an exceptional degree. Ninety-eight percent of materiel airlifted over the Hump by the US Air Force – the culmination of modern technology in China – was destined for US personnel, not for Chinese forces.Footnote ⁵⁶ Even the Soviet Union, whose transition to industrialization throughout the interwar period had been rife with challenges, was able to apply mechanized power in the form of tractors to agricultural production, and to provide soldiers with processed food rather than raw grain.Footnote ⁵⁷ In China, nonmechanized power was the major key; industrial production and technological advancement, the minor.

Indeed, it was the preindustrial nature of China’s struggle that captured the foreign observer’s eye, both during the war and long after. Joseph Needham, a British biochemist who headed a scientific mission to China, recorded in his journal that he was stuck at a crossroads in Shaanxi when “miles and miles of army supplies on foot came through … making everyone wait.” The trail of supplies was so long that Needham reported being delayed by 26 hours.Footnote ⁵⁸ Sam Damon, the protagonist of Anton Myrer’s Once An Eagle, published more than two decades after the war, marvels at his tortuous journey through China to join the Communist guerrillas as a US military observer. Transferring from train to steamer, then riding a cart and “a hammerheaded pony that would buck like a goat” before ending up on foot, Damon feels “as though he were slipping backward in time, gliding back along the chain of man’s painful mechanical progress, returning to elementals.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In the largest land theater in Asia, most of Free China’s food supply moved to preindustrial time (Figure 0.1). “[Technological] time [is] always jumbled up.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Figure 0.1 “A Heavy Load Being Hauled on A Cart in Szechuan.”

Source: Taken on April 30, 1943. Photograph by Joseph Needham, reproduced courtesy of the Needham Research Institute. The image starkly captures the preindustrial rhythm to which materials – including grain – were transported throughout China.

For China’s leaders, this temporal enmeshing was a deliberate approach. Jiang Baili was explicit in his advocacy for a careful combination of China’s historical resources and innovations from abroad. To face China’s conundrum, he argued, it would not do to only revive the old, or to only learn about the new; China would have to forge a path between the historical and the novel.Footnote ⁶¹ On the one hand, the extensive use of historical precedent demonstrated the Nationalists’ versatility and innovation. The Nationalists themselves wielded historicity as a legitimizing tool, justifying their schemes as updated iterations of tried-and-tested means. Because historicity figured so powerfully in both policymaking and propaganda, the book pays close attention to continuities across imperial, prewar, and wartime periods, particularly in the middle chapters. On the other hand, such heavy reliance on historical experience betrayed the impossibility of China’s circumstances. Even with the inflow of US aid, China had its history and little else with which to stay in the war.

China’s preindustrial efforts, remarkable in both depth and scale, compels us to reconsider total war as a historical phenomenon. The concept has been retrospectively applied to some of the pre- or semi-industrial conflicts of the nineteenth century; as Strachan notes, the generation of scholars who had witnessed World War I tended to backdate the emergence of total war to the French Revolution.Footnote ⁶² But the China theater reminds us that preindustrial, protracted conflict should be an integral part of total war discourse not as a matter of ex post facto, but because it was an integral part of its historical unfolding in the 1930s and 1940s. The Chinese themselves unequivocally saw their struggle in this way.

By the same token, wartime China also serves to qualify the prevailing image of World War II as one of industrial and technological prowess. Phillips Payson O’Brien has argued that “the war was won” with the Allies’ unprecedented application of air and sea power against Germany and Japan.Footnote ⁶³ The focus on modern ingenuity is especially strong in the Pacific theater. The dramatic use of dive bombers at Midway, the island-hopping campaigns of the south and mid-Pacific, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and the nuclear decimation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have all dominated accounts of the Pacific War.Footnote ⁶⁴ In highlighting the amassing of premodern resources across China’s vast landmass, the book departs from these nascent modes of mobility in wartime Asia. It brings us out of the “third dimension” and back to earth, so to speak, to explore how those caught up in Chinese military provisioning confronted the country’s mountains, plains, and rivers.

Logistics as Methodology

The book presents logistics as a means of bridging the gulf between social and strategic approaches to war. While, in the past few decades, military historians have striven to incorporate social, cultural, and economic perspectives, operational analyses continue to raise eyebrows within the academy.Footnote ⁶⁵ Studies of logistics are especially far removed from nonspecialist audiences.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the tradition of Martin van Creveld’s landmark study of 1977, the scholarship on supplying war focuses on the position of logistical expertise within military institutions, the evolution of supply methods along with technological advancement, and the impact of logistics on operations and strategy.Footnote ⁶⁷ Aside from perhaps an occasional remark about pillaging, they offer little insight into how logistics impacted civilian communities and institutions. This is not a deficiency, simply a reflection of their intended audience of military specialists.

However, the methodological separation between the strategic and social is not always necessary or even desirable. A smattering of studies of war logistics in other times and places hints at its richness as a well of information about social and economic life. Dai Yingcong’s pioneering work on the military campaigns of the high Qing period reveals the pivotal logistical role of corvée labor. Military labor forces for the Jinchuan campaigns absorbed both Sichuanese locals and migrants from elsewhere, who did everything from transporting wounded soldiers to shoveling snow.Footnote ⁶⁸ Peter Perdue has memorably explored how the clash among the Qing, Muscovy, and Zunghar empires changed the political and economic landscapes of central Asia. As they plunged deep into the steppes, the Qing tapped on the resources of Chinese populations to build long supply lines, with significant and lasting effects on commerce and the economy.Footnote ⁶⁹ Masato Hasegawa highlights how the demands of long-distance provisioning during the late sixteenth-century Japanese invasion of Korea adversely impacted the agricultural livelihoods of civilians living astride the Yalu River, causing “destitution.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Elisabeth Kaske examines how the Qing administration solicited civilian resources, including grain and pack animals, to respond to crises between the 1850s and 1860s, such as the famous Taiping civil war. Extractions of cash and grain and eventual widespread pillaging by hungry mutinying troops devastated towns and villages.Footnote ⁷¹

Grains of Conflict illustrates how the technicalities of provisioning give us rare insight into the experiences of ordinary actors who have been marginalized in historical scholarship. For instance, the everyday operations of logistical networks serve as a narrow but precious window into the daily struggles of low-ranking officials who worked at levels below that of the county. Overshadowed by more powerful policymakers in Chongqing, and sandwiched between the central state and the communities in which they worked, these local implementors emerged as both perpetrators and victims of total war mobilization. More broadly, military logistical policies were deeply embedded in social and economic systems. Thus, they invariably had immediate repercussions for the building blocks of civilian economic life – taxation regimes, currency flows, the organization and distribution of labor. They came to define civilian prospects for survival, presenting ordinary people with a consequential array of threats and opportunities that either made or broke livelihoods. They also physically connected civilian and combatant spheres: Across China, supply chains literally threaded far-flung communities through to garrisons and frontline units. Examining these sprawling supply chains allows us to track processes of militarization and to assess their extent. Logistical processes are essential for reimagining the quotidian aspect of war.

Sources and Approach

The book is divided into five chapters. Hostilities feature most prominently in the first and final chapters, while the middle chapters bring to the foreground the institutional means of mass mobilization. Key Nationalist organizations include the Rear Services Department (Houfang qinwubu 後方勤務部), the Military Grain Bureaus (Junliangju 軍糧局), the Ministry of Grain (Liangshibu 糧食部), and the Ministry of Transport (Jiaotongbu 交通部). In addition to the records of the Ministry of Grain, housed at the Academia Historica’s Xindian Office, the book also makes extensive use of the Second Historical Archive of China’s 20-volume compilation of historical material on military grain during the war against Japan (Kangri junliang dang’an xuanbian 抗日軍糧檔案選編). To my knowledge, no other study at the time of writing has utilized this comprehensive collection, which was published in 2019.

The book further draws on a wide array of Chinese-language publications on such topics as military logistics, storage techniques, and agricultural affairs. These include wartime journals, magazines, gazettes, military logistical handbooks and manuals, and internal army publications and specialized series published by central and provincial government organs. These materials are critical supplements to the records of relevant ministries and departments. They provide a rare and vital glimpse into the mechanics of policy execution, and often also include close observations about local conditions. The officials who penned these accounts of their work were often dispatched from county, provincial or even central bodies to walk the ground and observe sites of grain collection, storage and transportation, and so were acutely aware of how practice cleaved to or deviated from theory. Some magazines also published series of travel diaries by Chinese writers, which contained telling vignettes about life in the settlements they passed through. The personal observations of US and British army officers, ambassadors, journalists, and travelers also offer glimpses into local conditions. Not all of these foreigners were well versed in Chinese politics and society, and their writings were often tinged with preconceptions about the government or the CCP. Still, in the absence of written records by ordinary civilians, these writings, selected carefully, serve as valuable clues about their circumstances. Together, all these sources move the book through multiple tiers of analysis, from an examination of overall Nationalist strategic positioning to central and provincial levels of planning, and finally, the minutiae of local implementation.

The book’s emphasis on the movement of grain precludes the typical historiographical focus on major cities, such as the capital Chongqing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, and Chengdu, or, occasionally, the Nationalists’ wartime provincial home, Sichuan. Rather, it roams across provincial lines. It studies the enactment of tax in kind and other grain management policies in both war zones and the rear zones, from Shanxi in the west to Guangdong in the east. It explores the extraction of grain from the fertile provinces of Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi, which, for their positions in the heart of China, also saw significant military action throughout the war. It examines the centrality of food in three-way guerrilla conflicts in heavily contested portions of Shandong, Henan, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui. It traverses the rear zone by tracing the major relay transport routes connecting Sichuan with Shaanxi, Gansu, Xinjiang, and Hunan. It finds its way into Yunnan, the host province of the Chinese Expeditionary Force, which crossed the Salween River for campaigns in northern Burma. In this way, the book highlights a remarkable consistency in policy and experience throughout Free China. The overwhelming challenges of provisioning and the perennial danger of hunger transcended political and geographical variation.

The book ends by examining the final phase of the war, which began in April 1944 with the Imperial Japanese Army’s largest offensive to date, Operation Ichigō. This last spurt of hostilities threw Nationalist provisioning strategies into disarray once more and spurred a series of last-minute overhauls in bureaucratic and military structures. However, these changes hardly had time to take root before Japan announced its unconditional surrender to the Allies in August 1945, forcing China to brace instead for the aftermath of eight years of protracted conflict. The exigencies of the war’s final year laid bare the near-insurmountable nature of China’s fundamental challenge: surviving a modern war with an agrarian resource base. This is the story of China’s survival – the story of a unique variation of total war, one waged as much by the peasant, the laborer, the boatman, the cart-bearer, and the local administrative official as by the soldier and officer.