A History of Warfare in East Asia

This book represents a summation of some of the latest scholarship on the subject of warfare in East Asia. Because of the paucity of books on the subject, it is an obviously underrepresented subject, and this book is, by no means, intended to be conclusive. Hopefully, it will serve as a conduit to the cutting-edge authors cited liberally throughout. Limitations on language have also prevented American scholars from effectively researching the patterns of the past with predictable results. In many ways, America currently finds itself subject to a type of imperial overstretch, and it is hoped this book will start undergraduate-level students in a direction towards approaching the general patterns of warfare represented throughout history in a region most likely to be of concern in the near future.

Generalizations and some determinism are the risks to the reader in this humble attempt to draw conclusions from five thousand years of history and the largest collection of humanity on the planet. Proper humility demands a request for grace from the reader as we start this journey together.

The first section of this work attempts to describe in extraordinarily general terms the patterns of Chinese society that have contributed to what has been described in a sort of 1990s historiographic pattern as Chinese Ways of Warfare (CWoF). Likewise, the second unit will attempt to describe Japanese reliance upon the military and describe the sad path Japanese militarism took into China. Modernity traumatized the great Chinese and Japanese civilizations, and a search for national unity emerged in the quest for resources. The third unit details the emergence of Russia as a contender for influence in East Asia that will contribute to decisions that will turn the regional conflicts into global warfare with horrific and unpredictable results.

One of the consequences of global warfare will be the unsuccessful appeals to the United States to support the Nationalist Chinese. The final chapter of this book will explore, in extremely broad strokes, the Chinese Civil War and the emergence of the juggernaut of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The Korean War will reveal the ignorance of Americans on Chinese perspectives in East Asia, while the Vietnam War may ultimately represent the start of the final act in a long century of an American military presence in East Asia.