China was afflicted by a brutal succession of conflicts through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet there has never been clear understanding of how wartime suffering has defined the nation and shaped its people.

In Beyond Suffering, a distinguished group of historians of modern China look beyond the geopolitical aspects of war to explore its social, institutional, and cultural dimensions. The chapters in Part 1, “Society at War,” reveal how militarization and war can both structure and destabilize society, while those in Part 2, “Institutional Engagement,” show how institutions and the people they represent can become pawns in larger power struggles. Lastly, Part 3, “Memory and Representation,” examines the various media, monuments, and social controls by which war has been memorialized.

Based on fragmented accounts of poorly understood incidents, Beyond Suffering pieces together a fuller picture of the multiple fronts on which wars in modern China have been fought, experienced, and remembered.

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James Flath is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario and author of The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art, and History in Rural North China. Norman Smith is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Guelph and author of Resisting Manchukuo: Chinese Women Writers and the Japanese Occupation.

Contributors: Timothy Brook, Blaine Chiasson, James Flath, Colin Green, Chang Jui-te, Diana Lary, Bernard Hung-kay Luk, Edward A. McCord, M. Colette Plum, Norman Smith, Michael Szonyi, Alexander Woodside, and Victor Zatsepine.