The Tenth Lecture of the “Unmasking the CCP: History, Politics, and Society in Post-1949 China” Lecture Series

Time: 3:00-4:30 pm, April 21, 2026, Tuesday.

Location: Uris Hall 438

Title: China: The Pivot of the Greater Second World War?

Speaker: Prof. Ruth Lawlor (Department of History, Cornell University)

Abstract:

Despite its epic scope, China’s War of Resistance to Japanese Aggression has long been marginalized in Anglophone histories of the Second World War, often reduced to a sidebar to the US war with Japan. In this framework, China’s main contribution to the global war was limited to the role played by Chinese military forces in “tying down” Japanese troops that might otherwise have fought the Americans in the Pacific. But these retrospective accounts ignore the centrality of the Chinese theatre to contemporary understandings of the global war.  Writing in early 1938, for example, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky argued that China would be the “most important object of struggle” in the coming world war. This assessment was shared by top strategists in Washington, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Leahy, who proclaimed that “whoever ends up in control of China has won the Pacific War.” Viewed in this light, the ultimate outcome of the war between the United States and Japan no longer appears as an unequivocal American victory. Instead, the unfolding of a powerful revolution within and alongside the civil, regional and world wars that raged in China between 1931 and 1949 emerges as one of the most important global outcomes of the war. This talk will reevaluate China’s place in the Greater Second World War, tracing the history of its “nested” wars, highlighting the great GI mutiny of 1945-46 which made U.S. military intervention in the Civil War impossible, and pointing to the long-term consequences of these momentous events. 

Speaker’s Bio:

Prof. Ruth Lawlor is a historian of war and U.S. foreign relations. She is the author of The Trials of Total War: Sexual Violence and US Military Justice in World War II, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press, and co-editor of The Greater Second World War: Global Perspectives (Cornell, 2025). She is currently writing a history of Arctic imperialism.