Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China's Total War, 1937 - 1945

Abstract 

Grains of Conflict is the first in-depth examination of how the Nationalist government fed their armies during its war against Japan. Jennifer Yip demonstrates how the Chinese government relied on mass civilian mobilization to carry out all stages of military provisioning, from procurement to transportation and storage. China sustained total war, and survived eight years of war against all odds, by exhaustively harnessing civilian resources to military provisioning. The intensive use of civilian labor and assets–a distinctly preindustrial resource base–shaped China's conception of its total war effort, and distinguished China's experience as unique among World War Two combatants. The book thus challenges the predominant image of World War II as one of technological prowess and the tendency to conflate total war with industrialized warfare. 

Bio

Jennifer Yip is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. She is a historian of war, strategy, and the socio-economic effects of war mobilization, with a focus on Republican China. She received her PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was also an affiliate of the Asia Policy Program. Her work has appeared in Modern China and the Journal of Transport History, as well as in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Military History.