100 Books Like Red Star over China

For many years, American views of the China’s role in World War II were strongly influenced by Barbara Tuchman’s best-selling, Stilwell and the American Experience in China published in 1971. Tuchman painted China’s war effort as brave but costly and ineffective thanks to the incompetence and corruption of Chiang Kai Shek. Portrayed as a kind of Chinese George Washington in the U.S. media, Tuchman saw Chiang as being in fact, far less interested in defeating the Japanese than in ensuring that his regime survived the war in a position to vanquish its domestic rivals, especially Mao Zedong’s Communists 

In contrast, Mittar’s focus is not on policy squabbles or specific military issues but on the overall impact of the war on China and its people. He highlights that country’s remarkable achievement, not in winning battles but in surviving the Japanese onslaught for eight long years despite the early loss of almost… show more.

Do you need a good cathartic cry? This book serves as a pillar to remind the world of the atrocities that happened in December of 1937. I remember having to stop after reading certain chapters and engage in self-care, as to take a break from the pain and suffering that it retells. I paused to reflect that I had been glad that the Nazis were occupying certain parts of the city which in-turn provided relief to the Chinese. I can’t fathom the amount of destruction this Capitol endured between contests to see who can be the first to kill 100 people with a sword before the capture of the city to the systematic rape and mutilation of women and young girls. 

This was a major battle that happened in 1937, right before the Rape of Nanking. After the fall of Shanghai, the Japanese army would march toward, Nanking (Nanjing), the capital of China then. Although it was front page news throughout much of the world then, few people other than historians know it today. It is no hyperbole to call the battle Stalingrad on the Yangtze. The book reads like an engrossing historical novel.

I find Ghost Soldiers to be an excellent account of the rescue of Allied POWs, many held since the outset of the U.S. involvement in World War II, from the infamous Cabanatuan Japanese Prisoner of War Camp in central Luzon in the Philippines. Based upon interviews of those involved, it would be used as one of two true-to-life books to create the 2005 movie The Great Raid. This book has a strong place in my heart since Ed Babler was marched to this POW camp soon after surrendering on the offshore island of Corregidor and would spend at least three months there.

Vincent Sheean’s memoir, published in 1935, stands out because it established a genre of memoir writing by foreign correspondents and because of its high literacy value.

“It has now been 30 years or more since Vincent Sheean wrote his Personal History,” commented Saturday Review of Literature editor Norman Cousins commented years later. “Many of the foreign correspondents have tried to convey the same sense of an intimate, interactive relationship with events and people that gave such luster to Sheean’s book.”

Sheean’s still-young career had spanned the globe for Europe, to North Africa and the Middle East, to the 1920s revolution in China, to the Soviet Union. His story was about himself insofar as it described how the news felt to him.

The events he witnessed proved the most important of the period in which he lived. Sheean went on in a similar fashion after the book appeared, displaying almost… show more.

I vividly recall reading Farson’s book when I was a budding journalist.

Farson worked for the Chicago Daily News, a newspaper that is gone now, but was pioneer in modern American journalism, not only for its principled reporting but also its talented staff. The Daily News was the first to field a substantial corps of American reporters abroad. (The New York Times only did so much later.)

Farson was everywhere, which did not distinguish him from many other correspondents, but he was legendary for the high quality of his writing. His colleagues said he was a “combination Childe Harold and Captain from Castile.” 

Unhappy with the request that he come back to Chicago to work awhile, he quit and went to Dalmatia to write Way of the Transgressor.  

When the Great Depression hit and jobs were scarce, there was no point in hanging around at home. 

“Prices in Europe were down to rock bottom,” wrote Albion Ross of his first overseas trip in 1930. “In addition, Mussolini’s government, for some inscrutable Fascist reason, was offering students a fantastic third-class railway ticket that took you from the Channel ports round and about through France and Italy for next to nothing.”

He found a spot in Berlin with the New York Evening Post and later The New York Times. Apart from a stint in the military during the war, he remained an overseas reporter for years.

His memoir is extraordinary because it is short on derring-do and long on sensitivity about what he witnessed. It is perhaps for this reason that neither Ross nor his book are much remembered. I would not have known about it if he had… show more.

Though largely forgotten, Jack Belden is one of the best war reporters in American history.

A tormented man, he had PTSD before the term existed. While recovering from wounds sustained during the Allied invasion of Italy, he wrote Still Time to Die. He wrote, “My life, more than that of anyone I know, has been spent in lonely wanderings among the dreary wastelands of war.”

He lived a raw life with regular Chinese soldiers. Of his sensations during a shelling with them, he wrote, “I was not only tingling with delirious excitement, but, to my great astonishment, I realized that I was almost panting with a sexual kind of pleasure, and I found myself leaning against the wind, surrendering to the rough caress of the sand, pulsing and throbbing and thrilling to the crashing, tumultuous orchestration of the shells which were now beating the earth about us with a… show more.

To understand where China is now, and where it has been travelling from since 1949 when the People’s Republic was established, you need to grapple with the complex history that preceded that. German sinologist Klaus Muhlhahn expertly does this, succinctly drawing out the key theme of institution-building and showing how this provides the link between the final imperial period of the Qing to its collapse in 1911, and then the slow rise to power of the Communists over the 1920s to the 1940s when China was fragmented and beset by war. Accessible, authoritative, and ambitious.

Moment in Peking is an elegy to a lost world and a past way of life.

The main character, Yao Mulan, falls victim to human traffickers in 1900 as her family flees from Beijing. Although she is soon rescued, this experience turns her life in new and unexpected directions. We follow Yao Mulan through war, famine, and revolution, the fall of the Qing dynasty, the tumultuous Republican era, the rise of warlords, and the Japanese invasion in 1936, facing every challenge with indomitable courage.

This is a great evocation of early twentieth century Chinese history, from the perspective of someone who lived through terrible events.