New Books In East Asian Studies

Following the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, two antipodal ideologies vied for control of China's military. The first, advanced by Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), maintained that the military was little more than an organ of the KMT party apparatus. As such, the Chinese army was a "party-army," beholden to the KMT's will, and subservient to KMT demands. Opposing the "party-army" ideology was a cadre of nationalistic, cosmopolitan Chinese officers, who sought to fashion the army into a professional, technically proficient, and independent institution, loyal not to any one party, but to the Chinese nation. The dynamic of this previously unexamined struggle is the subject of Eric Setzekorn's erudite study, The Rise and Fall of an Officer Corps: The Republic of China Military, 1942-1955 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). Between 1942 and 1955, Setzekorn argues, professionally-minded officers within the KMT leveraged their military partnership with the United States to build China's first truly