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War & Society Volume 31, 2012 - Issue 2: Bringing Asia into Focus: Civilians and Combatants in the Line of Fire in China and Indochina
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Introduction

Bringing Asia into Focus: Civilians and Combatants in the Line of Fire in China and Indochina

Christopher Goscha
Pages 87-105 | Published online: 12 Nov 2013

  • Howard Michael, War in European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) (first published in 1976) and The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France (London: Routledge, 2001) (first published in 1961). See also William McNeil’s fine study, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since ad 1000 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982).
  • Keegan John, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976) (reissued by Penguin).
  • Mosse GeorgeL., Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Paul Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Doubleday, 2000); and Peter Englund, The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War (London: Profile Books, 2011).
  • Duby Georges, Le Dimanche de Bouvines (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).
  • Mann Michael, The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to ad 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and The Sources of Social Power: Volume 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation States 1760–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Michael Mann, ‘Were the Perpetrators of Genocide ‘Ordinary Men’ or ‘Real Nazis’? Results from Fifteen Hundred Biographics’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 14·3 (2000), 331–66; Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, ad 990–1990 (Cambridge: B. Blackwell, 1990); and Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
  • This is part of a collaborative research project on the socio-cultural experiences of war in China and Indochina between scholars (Vatthana Pholsena, François Guillemot, and Christian Henriot) at the Institut d’Asie Orientale (CNRS/ENS) in Lyon and Christopher Goscha at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Also see our contributions in the European Journal of East Asian Studies, 9·2 (2010).
  • Perdue Peter, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
  • Wade Geoff, ‘The Zheng He Voyages: A Reassessment’, Asia Research Institute, Working Paper, No. 31 (October 2004), available at: <http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/docs/wps/wps04_031.pdf> (accessed 4 June 2012) and Geoff Wade, ‘Ming Chinese Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia’, in Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia, ed. by Kark Hack and Tobias Rettig (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 73–104.
  • Merridale Catherine, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Richard Overy, Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941–1945 (London: Penguin, 1998); Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York: Penguin, 2002); and Timothy Synder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
  • Of course, archival problems are not limited to the communist world. Mark Mazower deplored the sad state of the national archives in Greece when it came to researching his book, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
  • See Duong Thu Huong, Novel Without a Name (New York: Penguin, 1996); Paradise of the Blind (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 1993); and Nina McPherson’s biographical entry for Duong Thu Huong available at: <http://vietnamlit.org/wiki/index.php?title=Duong_Thu_Huong> (accessed 4 June 2012). See also: Chuyen nhung nguoi lam nen lich su, hoi uc Dien Bien Phu, 1954–2009 (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Chinh Tri Quoc Gia, 2009) and especially the French language translation and more critical adaptation of this book Dien Bien Phu vu d’en face, Paroles de bo doi, ed. by Dao Thanh Huyen, Dang Duc Tue, Nguyen Xuan Mai, Pham Huai Thanh, Pham Hoang Nam and Pham Thuy Hoang (Paris: Nouveau Monde Editions, 2010). The most famous novel on the ‘sorrow’ of the Vietnam War is Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996) (first published in Vietnamese in 1991).
  • Kwon Heonik, After the Massacre. Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Shaun Malarney, Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam (London: Curzon Press, 2003); Shawn McHale, ‘Understanding the Fanatic Mind? The Viet Minh and Race Hatred in the First Indochina War, 1945–1954’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 4·3 (October 2009), 98–138; and Christina Schwenkel, The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009).
  • Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Asia, ed. by Stewart Lone (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007).
  • Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and The American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
  • Johnathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).
  • Jacques Gernet, Le Monde Chinois, 4th edn (Paris: Armand Colin, 1999), pp. 461–509.
  • Lary Diana, Warlord Soldiers: Chinese Common Soldiers, 1911–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Edward McCord, The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Edward McCord, ‘Burn, Rape, Kill and Rob: Military Atrocities, Warlordism and Anti Warlordism in Republican China’, in The Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Chinese Society, ed. by Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2001); Edward A. McCord, ‘Cries that Shake the Earth: Military Atrocities and Popular Protests in Warlord China’, Modern China, 31·1 (January 2005), 3–34; and Diana Lary, The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
  • George Dutton explores the transformative effects of the Tay Son uprising and wars in The Tay Son Uprising: Society and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), Chapter 4 (p. 132 for casualties, p. 179 for the population).
  • Charney MichaelW., Southeast Asian Warfare, 1300–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Michael W. Charney (ed.), ‘Warfare in Early Modern South East Asia’, South East Asia Research (Special Issue), 12·1 (2004), pp. 5–136. See also Victor Lieberman, Burmese Administrative Cycles. Anarchy and Conquest, 1580–1770 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Michael Charney, ‘Warfare in Early Modern South East Asia: Introduction’, South East Asia Research, 12·1 (2004), 5–12; among others.
  • Recent scholarships on the violent American colonial conquest of the Philippines are changing this. Vicente Rafael, ‘White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance to the US Colonization of the Philippines’, in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Paul A. Kramer, ‘Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the US Empire: The Philippine-American War as Race War’, Diplomatic History, 30·2 (April 2006), 169–210; and Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
  • Of course one of the earliest works of history comes to us from Thucydides, an Athenian general who served in the Peloponnesian wars. See: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian Wars (London: Penguin Classics, 1972).
  • See the original version, containing in brackets the later censored parts, of Loti’s account of the battle in ‘Tonkin, la prise de Hue: Dans le campement des marins de l’Atlante’, Gulliver, 5 (January–March 1991), 202–15.
  • Bourke Joanna, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London: Granta Books, 1999).
  • Mus Paul, Le destin de l’Union française, de l’Indochine à l’Afrique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1954), Part II, pp. 115–220. On Mus and his analysis of men and societies at war, see Christopher Goscha, ‘So What Did You Learn From War? Violent Decolonization & Paul Mus’ Search for Humanity’, South East Asia Research (2012), forthcoming. For an essential account of men in the heat of battle, see John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (London: Aurum Press, 2009) (first published in 1980) as well as Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian Wars.
  • Ramsay Jacob, Mandarins and Martyrs: The Church and the Nguyen Dynasty in Early Nineteenth Century Vietnam (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 156–66.
  • Howard Michael, ‘Men Against Fire: Expectations of War in 1914’, International Security, 9·1 (Summer 1984), 41–57.
  • Mark Mazower, ‘Libya Remembers, We Forget: These Bombs are Not the First’, The Guardian, 25 March 2011.
  • See, among other publications, Christian Henriot, ‘Invisible Deaths, Silent Deaths: Bodies Without Masters in Republican Shanghai’, Journal of Social History, 43·2 (Winter 2009), 407–37; and Christian Henriot, ‘A Neighbourhood Under the Storm: Zhabei and Shanghai Wars’, European Journal of East Asian Studies, 9·2 (2010), 291–319.
  • Thomas Martin, The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics, and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), Chapter 7; and Martin Thomas, ‘Fighting ‘Communist Banditry’ in French Vietnam: The Rhetoric of Repression after the Yen Bay’, French Historical Studies, 34·4 (Fall 2011), 611–48.
  • Lary, The Chinese People at War.
  • Snyder, Bloodlands.
  • Lary, The Chinese People at War; Hans J. van de Ven, ‘War in the Making of Modern China’, Modern Asian Studies (Special Issue: War in Modern China), 30·4 (October 1996), 737–56; and Scars of War; China at War: Regions of China, 1937–1945 ed. by Stephen R. MacKinnon, Diana Lary, and Ezra F. Vogel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). It is impossible to cite all of the work being done by this exciting group of scholars. To cite a few of the recent book-length publications of the editors see: Stephen R. MacKinon, Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); McCord, The Power of the Gun; Lary, The Chinese People at War; and Warfare in Chinese History, ed. by Hans J. van de Ven (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2000).
  • McCord, ‘Burn, Rape, Kill and Rob’.
  • MacKinon, Wuhan, 1938; Stephen MacKinnon, ‘The Tragedy of Wuhan, 1938’, Modern Asian Studies (Special Issue: War in Modern China), 30·4 (October 1996), 931–43.
  • Lary Diana, ‘Drowned Earth: The Breaching of the Yellow River Dykes, 1938’, War in History, 8·2 (2001), 191–207.
  • A Joint Study of the Sino-Japanese War, 1931–1945, Harvard University Asia Center, available at: <http://www.fas.harvard.edu/˜asiactr/sino-japanese/index.htm> [accessed 4 June 2012].
  • In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai Under Japanese Occupation, ed. by Christian Henriot and Wen-Hsin Yeh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Wartime Shanghai, ed. by Wen-Hsin Yen (London: Routledge, 1998).
  • Ruptured Histories: War and Memory in Post-Cold War Asia, ed. by Rana Mitter and Sheila Miyoshi Jager (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Rana Mitter, ‘Modernity, Internationalisation, and War in the History of Modern China’, The Historical Journal, 48·2 (2005), 523–43; Rana Mitter and Aaron William Moore, ‘China in World War II, 1937–1945: Experience, Memory, and Legacy’, Modern Asian Studies (Special Issue), 45·2 (2011), 225–40; and Neil J. Diamant, Embattled Glory: Veterans, Military Families, and the Politics of Patriotism in China, 1949–2007 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010).
  • The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945, ed. by Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans van de Ven (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
  • David Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Gabriel Kolko, Un siècle de guerres (Laval: Presses de l’Université de Laval, 2000), pp. 290–302.
  • Lary, The Chinese People at War, p. 62 and Lary, ‘Drowned Earth’, pp. 191–207. An emerging wave of environmental history of war is now emerging for China and Vietnam. See: Micah Muscolino, ‘Violence against People and the Land: The Environment and Refugee Migration from China’s Henan Province, 1938–1945’, Environment and History, 17·2 (2011), pp. 291–311 and his ‘Refugees, Land Reclamation, and Militarized Landscapes in Wartime China, 1937–1945’, The Journal of Asian Studies (2010), pp. 453–478. For Vietnam, see: David Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010).
  • Andrew Jacobs, ‘China is Wordless on Traumas of Communists’ Rise’, The New York Times, 2 October 2009, p. 1.
  • Dower John, War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon, 1986) and Embracing Defeat (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).
  • Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States, ed. by Laura Hein and Mark Seldon (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2000); Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Naoko Shimazu, Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009); Lee Kennedy Pennington, ‘Wartorn Japan: Disabled Veterans and Society, 1931–1952’, PhD dissertation (Columbia University, 2008); and The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945, ed. by Peter Duus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
  • Christopher Bayly and Timothy Harper, Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) and Forgotten Armies (London: Penguin Books, 2005). Paul Kratoska, Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire (Singapore: NUS Press, 2006).
  • On colonialism in Europe under the Germans, see Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (London: Penguin Books, 2008).
  • Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
  • François Guillemot, ‘Death and Suffering at First Hand: Youth Shock Brigades During the Vietnam War (1950–1975)’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 4·3 (October 2009), 17–60; Shawn McHale, ‘Understanding the Fanatic Mind? The Viet Minh and Race Hatred in the First Indochina War, 1945–1954’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 4·3 (October 2009), 98–138. For a wider take on violence and the state, see Mark Mazower, ‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century’, The American Historical Review, 107·4 (October 2002), 1158–78.
  • Callahan MaryP., Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
  • Gross JanT., ‘Themes for a Social History of War Experience and Collaboration’, in The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath, ed. by Istvan Deak, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 15–36.
  • Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
  • McMahon RobertJ., The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 57.
  • Micheal Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference, 1900–1992, Vol. 2 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1992), entries for Chinese Civil War, Korean War, Indochina War, and Vietnam War.
  • Nguyen Huy Tuong, La campagne de Cao Lang (Hanoi: Editions en langues étrangères, 1962), pp. 76, 83.
  • Stathis Kalyvas, Mathew Kocher, and Tom Pepinsky, ‘Aerial Bombing and Counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War’, American Journal of Political Science, 55·2 (2011), 1–18.
  • I make this argument for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in my Vietnam: Un État né de la Guerre, 1945–54 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011).
  • Lentz ChristianC., ‘Making the Northwest Vietnamese’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 6·2 (Summer 2011), 68–105 and his ‘Mobilization and State Formation on a Frontier of Vietnam’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 38·3 (2011), 559–86.
  • Steven Heydemann provides a good theory-oriented starting point for the Middle East in War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East, ed. by Steven Heydemann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

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