The Japanese believed that they were excluded from the club of imperial nations on racial grounds. In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had put forward a proposal to guarantee racial equality at the League of Nations, but Woodrow Wilson overturned it in the face of majority support. That same year, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, who became Prime Minister in 1937, visited America, and the racism he witnessed convinced him that Britain and America would never treat Japan as an equal. “That the white people—and the Anglo-Saxon race in particular—generally abhor colored people is an apparent fact, so blatantly observable in the U.S. treatment of its black people,” he wrote. The Japanese, as Hotta observes, were model students of Western imperial ways, but they could not “change the color of their skin.”

By the mid-thirties, Chiang had subdued the Communists in the countryside through a series of scorched-earth campaigns. Mao was forced to retreat to the political backwater of Yan’an with his radically diminished troops, in what he later mythologized as the Long March. Chiang started to put in place an infrastructure for a modern society and economy. He converted to Christianity, and courted the United States with the help of his Wellesley-educated wife, Song Meiling. He had keen supporters among influential American Sinophiles, such as Henry Luce, whose parents had been missionaries in China. The Chinese, in Luce’s view, were free-market-loving Americans in the making. Mitter calls this the “fundamental misconception at the heart of much of the American thinking about China.”

In any case, puff pieces in Time did not alleviate Chiang’s vulnerability before the Japanese. They took advantage of the civil war to keep nibbling on Chinese territory from their base in Manchuria. Public sentiment overwhelmingly favored a truce between the Communists and the Nationalists, the better to take on the invaders, and Stalin helped broker an agreement, reasoning that a united China would save him the trouble of fighting Japan himself. Chiang despised the Japanese, calling them “dwarf bandits” (an imperial-era epithet), but he hesitated to attack, and the Communists taunted him as an appeaser.

In July, 1937, Japan launched a full-scale assault on China. Chiang decided to make a stand in Shanghai, since North China was already substantially under Japanese control. He began to speak of a “war of resistance to the end.” But, as Mitter explains, he had always known that he did not have enough military strength to fight the Japanese, who overran one city after another, forcing Chiang to relocate his military command to Wuhan, and the administration to the remote city of Chongqing.

Years of indoctrination about Japan’s superior status and its mission in Asia made the invaders see the Chinese as less than human. In Nanjing, Japanese soldiers used civilians for sword practice, and tied them together in groups of a hundred, then set fire to them. This “uninterrupted spree of murder, rape, and robbery,” as Mitter calls it, presaged a 1941 policy known as the Three Alls—“Kill all, burn all, loot all.” Occasional Chinese military successes were quickly offset by disasters, often self-inflicted. Chiang, in a futile attempt to stop the Japanese advance on Wuhan, breached the dikes of the Yellow River. The flood inundated more than thirteen million acres of central China, killed half a million of Chiang’s countrymen, and made refugees of up to five million. Mitter rates this as an atrocity greater than any perpetrated by the Japanese.

Mitter’s book reflects a shift in Chinese historiography from a Cold War preoccupation with revolutions and ideologies to a close examination of the crucible of war in which modern China was forged. He describes how Chiang’s makeshift government in Chongqing began to formulate notions of citizenship by creating a system of identity cards. The mobilizing of the citizenry for war led to a push to involve women in public life, and ordinary people came to expect more of their rulers. An ambitious new territorial conception of China sprang up, which included minorities like the Tibetans and the Uighurs.

Mitter also shows how both the Nationalists and the Communists “recognized and accepted the use of terror as part of the mechanism of control.” Together, they created the foundations of China’s authoritarian system. In Yan’an in 1942, Mao launched a “Rectification Movement”; the campaign, which used torture to bring people in line with “Mao Zedong Thought,” became, as Mitter writes, a “blueprint” for the Cultural Revolution. At the same time, the Communists developed “genuine instruments of mass mobilization,” such as land reform and efficient administration. Their military engagement mostly consisted of guerrilla skirmishes, and their exemption from conventional battles with the Japanese enabled them to boost their military strength several times over.

European powers, unwilling to antagonize Japan, offered China little or no help. William Empson wrote of his suspicion “that ‘we’ want both parties to weaken each other.” Stalin sent some pilots to Chiang, and a retired U.S. Air Force officer named Claire Lee Chennault was recruited to train “China’s still minimal air force.” The eruption of war in Europe increased Chiang’s isolation, and a non-aggression pact between Japan and the Soviet Union, in 1941, deprived him of Soviet support. At Japanese insistence, Britain closed the Burma Road, which had enabled supplies from Rangoon to reach China’s troops. The United States was just as reluctant to get involved in Asia as it was to join the war against Hitler in Europe. Henry Luce’s magazines urged vigorous support for Chiang, to no avail, until the attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything.

In “Japan 1941,” Eri Hotta argues that there was nothing inevitable about the Pearl Harbor attack, which she describes as a “huge national gamble.” She scrupulously details the negotiations and squabbles among Japanese military and civilian leaders, against a backdrop of dauntingly complex domestic and international maneuverings. Japan in the thirties was undergoing a severe social and economic crisis, as a result both of the Great Depression and of the drain in resources caused by the war in China.

Japan’s leaders regarded revolutionary Communism as their biggest enemy. Their desire for protection against the Soviet Union was behind both Japan’s pact with Nazi Germany, in 1936, and its entry, in 1940, into the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, which established the Axis. The pact drew strong disapproval from commanders in the Japanese Navy, a redoubt of Anglophiles and Americanophiles. The leadership was keen not to antagonize America. But the Roosevelt Administration, drawing a lesson from Europe’s failure to stop Hitler’s incremental aggressions during the nineteen-thirties, saw Japanese expansionism as a force that had to be contained. Roosevelt was unnerved by Japan’s pacts with Germany and by its occupation, in 1940, of the strategically important northern half of French Indochina, which supplied much of America’s rubber and tin.

In July, 1941, the Japanese military advanced into the southern half of French Indochina, and the United States responded by freezing all Japanese assets and embargoing the sale of petroleum. The Dutch, who sold Sumatran oil to the Japanese, followed suit. Without oil, Japan’s war in China would be lost, and Tokyo calculated that it had two years or less before its supplies ran out. The options were to negotiate with America for the resumption of supplies or to occupy the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), a region rich in oil and rubber. The latter course would be impossible given the American Navy’s presence in the Pacific. The Japanese Navy’s chief of staff, Nagano Osami, reluctantly warned Emperor Hirohito that a preëmptive attack on the U.S. was the only option. “Could we expect a big victory?” Hirohito asked. “I am uncertain as to any victory,” Nagano replied, provoking the Emperor to say, “What a reckless war that would be.”

Hoping to avoid war, Japanese leaders entered into months of intense talks with the United States. But, convinced of their Manifest Destiny in Asia, they wouldn’t agree to Washington’s demand for a withdrawal from mainland China, which would amount to admitting defeat in a war that had exacted a huge price. The failure to reach agreement with the U.S. gave the militarist faction of Japan’s leadership greater sway, and there were angry outbursts in the Japanese press about “five centuries of white invasion” of Asia. As late as August, 1941, Prime Minister Konoe still hoped to pull off a last-minute grand bargain with Roosevelt at a summit meeting. The meeting never took place.

The war planners in Japan had greater momentum than the peacemakers, and Roosevelt’s own stance hardened after he learned of Japanese troop movements in the South Seas. The Americans demanded Japan’s withdrawal from mainland Asia, and Japanese leaders plunged deeper into what Hotta calls “suicidal fatalism.” It seemed that the only option was to inflict so much damage on the U.S. Navy that it would be unable to retaliate, and then to move fast to seize the oil fields of Southeast Asia. Many Japanese feared America’s response, and realized that they could be, as Churchill said, “ground to powder.” In September, 1941, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku warned his superiors that “a war with so little chance of success should not be fought.” Yamamoto nonetheless went on to design the attack on Pearl Harbor, though he remained skeptical of the prevailing hope that Japan might just overcome the odds, thanks to the indomitable spirit of its fighting men.

When Chiang heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor, he reportedly put on a record and danced. His war had become part of the Second World War, and he wrote to Roosevelt, committing China to a new “common battle.” He was soon made an Allied commander-in-chief, and an American general, Joseph Stilwell, became his chief of staff. A “four-year duel” ensued between Chiang and Stilwell, who was nicknamed Vinegar Joe for his caustic comments. Stilwell thought that Chiang, whom he called the Peanut, was excessively cautious as well as corrupt. (To wartime Americans he was known as Cash My-Check.)

Mitter takes a much more sympathetic view. In his revisionist analysis, American and British demands that Chiang should go on the offensive were disingenuous. Britain and America never had any intention of putting serious resources into rescuing China. “The great reason for backing China,” William Empson wrote, “is only that Japan must not be too strong.” The other Allied powers had no compunction about depleting Chiang’s limited resources as he confronted famine in one part of China and Japan’s depredations in another. American and British promises of military aid often didn’t come through, and Mitter details the various occasions on which “Chiang was repeatedly forced to deploy his troops in ways that served Allied geostrategic interests but undermined China’s own aims.” In 1945, at Yalta, F.D.R. secretly handed various privileges in Manchuria to Stalin. Chiang’s diary entries repeatedly denounced American diplomacy, which “really has no center, no policy, no morals” and, he wrote, regarded China merely “as meat on the chopping board.”