Review of Building a Nation at War: Transnational Knowledge Networks and the Development of China during and after World War II

During the Second World War, China was stretched to its utmost as it sought to resist the Japanese invasion: troops, resources, and government were all made to carry loads that they were never meant to bear. Yet even at this time of peril for the still-young Chinese Republic, there were significant efforts to try and create a formula for progress and development even at a time of war. One such effort was the Chinese attempt to develop its own scientific capabilities. It is this drive toward using science to “build the nation” by winning the war and shaping the peace that is the subject of J. Megan Greene’s well-written and significant new book, Building a Nation at War: Transnational Knowledge Networks and the Development of China during and after World War II. Greene’s book examines the careers and choices of Chinese scientists involved with the war effort in the years 1937 and 1945. They were working in the areas controlled by the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government of Chiang Kai-shek, which had gained precarious control of China in 1928 but had been forced to retreat to the temporary southwestern capital at Chongqing in 1937, after the outbreak of war with Japan. These scientists were not of one mind about the utility of science in those years: some embraced it as a means of providing further resistance to the Japanese invasion, while others were insistent on the idea that China should develop a pure science capacity, as befitted a nation that aspired to premier global status. As Greene argues (6), Nationalist China aspired to do both: develop science that could underpin the war effort, but which would also help build a settlement in the postwar.