Book review: J. Megan Greene,Building a Nation at War: Transnational Knowledge Networks and the Development of China during and after World War II

During the Second World War, the Nationalist Government of China faced the unprecedented challenge of trying to control and develop its hitherto relatively underdeveloped inland regions, in order to be able to sustain its military resistance to the Japanese who had occupied the most prosperous and developed eastern and central regions. It was also necessary to support the greatly increased population that had fled along with it into the interior during the war. This book discusses how they tried to achieve this with American help, and how the initiatives undertaken in this period continued to impact the development of China and Taiwan in the post-war years. The author has combed through numerous official archives and private library holdings in the PRC, Taiwan, the United States and Britain to provide a granular account of the Sino-American engagement to achieve both wartime and post-war developmental goals.

The emphasis in this study is on the knowledge production, knowledge transmission and knowledge adaptation that underlay and enabled these efforts, rather than on the strictly political or economic dimensions of the Sino-American engagement. It leads us through the painstaking processes of data collection (or surveying), planning, training of human resources and institution building that formed the core of the development efforts. Besides the Nationalist Government of China and the Government of the United States, the principal actors in these ventures included Chinese scientists and technical personnel, private American businesses, American experts, various foreign non-governmental organisations, as well as Chinese academics and experts, residents in the United States.

This book falls squarely within the category of studies that take the Nationalist Government seriously as a developmental state. Although the author admits that many of the plans to build China’s industry and infrastructure during this period did not quite bear fruit, her detailed narrative indicates that it was not because of want of effort. The book emphasises that, despite the constraints imposed by the constant warfare and the abysmal infrastructure in the interior of China, the Chinese and their American collaborators pursued in a systematic way the process of trying to develop industry and agriculture, and transport and communications in China, as well as to identify and train the personnel needed for this. Some of this yielded results in subsequent years and played some role in the developmental strides made both in the PRC and Taiwan.

The author is sensitive to the differences in perceptions and motivations of the actors involved in these efforts to develop China. While the US government was keen that they strengthen China’s war effort, the Nationalist Government also had its eye on China’s anticipated needs after the war. American experts involved in the efforts were interested in increasing production and improving efficiency as they saw it; on the other hand, the Chinese scientific and technical personnel and managers were concerned with how to make do with what they had and to get the best possible results under the far from ideal circumstances that they faced. American businesses got involved in helping China during the war not only because they felt it was their duty but equally with an eye on getting a share of the Chinese market after the war. Thus, although this was a joint effort couched in terms of a wartime alliance, there were many different interests and concerns at play. The author emphasises that the Chinese were not by any means passive recipients of a one-way transmission of knowledge from the United States but had their own ideas of what they wanted to achieve with the help that they received.

It is significant that the author has chosen to discuss the efforts to develop China both during and after the Second World War as one continuum. In that sense, this book is in keeping with more recent historical scholarship that tries to overcome the rigidity of chronological categories such as ‘pre-war’, ‘wartime’ and ‘post-war’. In fact, by choosing to also discuss how the Sino-American development programmes initiated in the early 1940s impacted academic and developmental efforts both in the PRC and in Taiwan after 1949, the author also breaks the convention of discussing the histories of post-revolution China and Taiwan separately.

Thus, the key takeaway of this book, in the opinion of this reviewer, is that the initiatives taken to strengthen China’s economy and particularly its scientific and technical capability during the war were not ephemeral or futile but had lasting consequences both in mainland China and Taiwan. One caveat is that the book is so focused on the initiatives themselves that the larger context that frustrated many of these efforts is somewhat glossed over. The civil war, rampant inflation, the unravelling of the Nationalist Government’s hold over the mainland, and so on, in the later 1940s, are touched on only in passing. Further, apart from some references to the UK, one does not get a sense of whether or not, Nationalist China, during the war or after, sought or received technical aid from other countries. We know, for instance, that the war was a period when scientific and technical collaboration between China and India increased, which laid the foundation for even more exchanges in the early years of the PRC. Since the subtitle of the book refers to ‘transnational knowledge networks’ rather than ‘Sino-US engagement’, one would expect something more on this. Nevertheless, the discussion is overall both comprehensive and nuanced and is an important contribution to our understanding of a crucial period in the development of modern China.