Sherman Xiaogang Lai, a former soldier of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), looks in this book at the role Shandong played between 1937 and 1945 in shaping the conflict between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Guomindang. His primary sources are annotated wartime documents published by provincial archivists in the 1980s and 1990s. He argues that the CCP established dominance in Shandong by integrating guerrilla warfare with revenue collection, grain requisition, and trade regulation and thus building a military-fiscal state, which it sustained by exploiting the wartime standoff between the Japanese (who lacked the capacity to administer the territory they occupied) and the Nationalists (who accorded Shandong a marginal role in its war). While the Communists initially adopted a low profile to conserve resources, the Guomindang raided the railway system to support the Allies in Southeast Asia and as a result became Japan's principal target. Later, the Communists...
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