The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949 (UNC Press, 2022) explores the wartime partnership between China and the United States from the ground up. Beginning in 1941, and especially after Pearl Harbor, both sides had high hopes for wartime cooperation against Japan. But as The Tormented Alliance shows, ‘a military alliance with the United States means a military occupation by the United States.’ This occupation was underpinned by inequalities of race, gender, nation, wealth, and power which strained relations between China and the United States during both the Second World War and the ensuing Chinese Civil War. The tens of thousands of US military personnel in China transformed themselves into a widely loathed occupation force: an aggressive, resentful, emasculating source of physical danger and compromised sovereignty. Following multiple archival trails, Fredman finds how negative on-the-ground interactions between US servicemen and all kinds of Chinese people – civilian and military – turned Sino-American cooperation into a ‘tormented alliance’ and helped unravel it from below.
This groundbreaking study is highly recommended for anyone interested in twentieth-century China, US foreign relations, and the history of war.
Mark Baker is lecturer (assistant professor) in East Asian history at the University of Manchester, UK.
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