Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China's Total War, 1937–1945

by Jennifer Yip

China's war against Japan was, at its heart, a struggle for food. As the Nationalists, Chinese Communist Party, and Japanese vied for a dwindling pool of sustenance, grain emerged as the lynchpin of their strategies for a long-term war effort. In the first in-depth examination of how the Nationalists fed their armies, Jennifer Yip demonstrates how the Chinese government relied on mass civilian mobilization to carry out all stages of provisioning, from procurement to transportation and storage. The intensive use of civilian labor and assets–a distinctly preindustrial resource base– shaped China's own conception of its total war effort, and distinguished China's experience as unique among World War Two combatants. Yip challenges the predominant image of World War II as one of technological prowess, and the tendency to conflate total war with industrialized warfare. Ultimately, China sustained total war against the odds with premodern by ruthlessly extracting civilian resources.

290 pages, Hardcover

Published July 31, 2025

Reviews

[Jonah Lo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclaimer: Dr. Yip is a faculty member from my department.

Grains is a rigorously researched text that provides important insight into the food dimension of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Drawing from an enormous range of official archives (including Chinese, Japanese, and Western) as well as a range of other sources such supply periodicals and newspapers, Yip convincingly argues that the food war was in fact the war that touched the vast majority of China the most for the longest period of time, and played a critical role in shaping all parts of combat, including the Civil War to come. Importantly, she also produces an powerfully emancipatory piece of scholarship that helps represent the contributions, exploitations, and sufferings of some of the most important workers of the War.

Yip's book is organised into several thematic chapters that each cover one aspect of the food war, such as grain procurement, storage, distribution, and embargo. This has the advantage of making the text more useful as a reference for other scholars. However, I suspect a chronological approach might have been better for the average/undergraduate reader. This would have better allowed for a reader to gain a sense of change and continuity in both institutions and people - especially wartime cycles of experimentation and learning as well as progressive economic decline and ersatz economics, two themes common in studies of wars in modernity. This sense can still somewhat be gained from a very careful parallel reading of the various chapters, but still feels unnecessarily difficult.