China in Disintegration by James Edward Sheridan

An examination of the various elements of national integration will show that most of them relate to both aspects, though usually much more to one than the other. Although it is useful to distinguish between these two aspects, they are interrelated and overlap in many ways.

Another is social, which refers to the extent to which the various strata of society-from the ruling elite to the masses-are bound together by a common culture, by national loyalties, by functional specialization and interdependence, and by participation in national movements and undertakings. One aspect of national integration is territorial-how closely regions and localities are linked together by economic and political transactions and by psychological and cultural similarities. National integration refers to the degree of cohesiveness of a nation, the extent to which its various elements interconnect to form a consolidated national unit. A sound and striking approach to these decades of desperation in the lives of a quarter of the human population-if not bypassed in the glut of 'China books, ' it may encourage students and academics to go further. He leaves out explicit investigation of the international context while underlining, more than most writers, Chiang's commitment to repay external debt at the expense of the Chinese people. Sheridan gives a strong sense of the rapine of the warlords who were Chiang's off-and-on allies, and of the feeble heritage of Sun Yat-sen's patriotic platitudes. The Kuomintang turned into a mere holding operation and faded into chaos. However, the book underlines Chiang's failure to give the masses a ''Strength through Joy'' spirit and, as wartime inflation of 300% gave way to postwar collapse, the anti-Communist pitch became emptier and emptier. The KMT did ensure that forced opium production took up at least a fifth of Chinese cropland by the 1929-1933 period, and they consolidated a soldier recruitment system that approximated Nazi roundups. The KMT failed either to create an effective dictatorship or to mobilize fascist passions which could ensure willingness to 'sacrifice.' Thus the difficulty in squeezing enough wealth out of the peasantry to meet a foreign debt which totaled half the national revenue. Sheridan's focus on the KMT brings more to light than do many surveys of Mao's revolutionaries. Sheridan, a Northwestern University scholar, concentrates on the Kuomintang movement of Chiang Kai-shek, insisting that we judge a political force by whether it solves the problems posed to it, not, as Chiang's partisans prefer, by means of what-if's. After the 1911 fall of the Manchus came the most hideous breakdown in Chinese history.

China in Disintegration by James Edward Sheridan