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The English-language history of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 has been dominated by the concern to explain and understand the origins of Communist rule and the establishment of the People's Republic of China. During the 1960s and 1970s a debate developed about the relative roles of appeals to nationalism and social justice in the Chinese Communist Party's mobilization of resistance to Japan during 1937 to 1945, as exemplified by Chalmers Johnson's Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (1962) and Mark Selden's The Yenan Way (1971). This debate and its subsequent interpretations lasted into the 1980s, when political change enabled access to archives and encouraged a more regionally diverse account of this struggle, as exemplified by Chen Yung-fa's Making Revolution (1986) and Lyman Van Slyke's contribution on "The Chinese Communist Movement during the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945" in the Cambridge History of China vol. 13 (1986).
This focus on the China War as the point of departure for the establishment of the People's Republic of China has had severe...