ABSTRACT
The reason that I have criticised the Stilwell–White paradigm in this book is not simply because many of Stilwell’s actions were badly designed and executed and general Allied strategy often detrimental to Chinese interests. I have suggested that this paradigm obscured that the Nationalists themselves opposed Japanese aggression and that they mobilised their own society to confront it. My aim has been to bring to the fore how they mobilised Chinese society themselves in the 1920s, then to resist Western imperialism, eliminate warlordism, and build a new nation, and how in the 1930s they turned to confront Japanese aggression and finally faced it on the battlefield. The consequence of the dominance of the Stilwell–White paradigm has been that these efforts were pressed to the sidelines by a version of events that I have hoped to have shown was of debatable historical accuracy.
