Jennifer Yip, "Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War, 1937-1945" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War, 1937-1945"

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Mark (New Books Network)
Guest: Professor Jennifer Yip, National University of Singapore
Date: November 15, 2025

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Overview

This episode centers on Professor Jennifer Yip’s book, Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War, 1937-1945. The book explores how food supply and grain provisioning shaped the military, social, and economic dynamics of China’s war with Japan. Yip argues that food was not just a logistical concern but a fundamental element influencing both high-level strategy and daily life during China's "total war." The discussion offers a fresh perspective on the war by focusing on food systems, challenging conventional narratives about military effectiveness and state-society relations.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Genesis of the Project and Research Direction

[02:53-04:55]

• Personal Interest: Yip’s training as a war historian with interest in both operations and the lived experience of war.
• Selection of Food as a Lens: Food links strategy and daily life uniquely; “Provisioning is… the cardinal element of war making…but on the other hand, it’s also this basic human need.” (Yip, [03:24])
• Temporal Sensitivity: Studying food requires examining history “by the day, if not by the hour,” revealing granular social and economic realities.
• Sensitivity to Tragedy: Research heightened awareness of the "tragedy and the cruelty of total war."

2. Food’s Centrality to China’s Total War

[05:39-12:53]

• Beyond Combat: Common war narratives “wired to look for drama” often miss how logistics like food define outcomes.
• China’s Unique Situation: Unlike other WWII belligerents, China faced “protracted foreign occupation,” governmental exile, internal division with the CCP, deep agrarian economy, and near-total international blockade.
• Distinctive Total War: China’s total war was “agrarian and protracted,” different from the industrial, modern notions usually associated with total war.
  • “China was a belligerent, waging its own distinct version of total war during World War II…A mainly agrarian economy that self-consciously inserted itself into the historical unfolding of total war in practice.” (Yip, [11:46])
• Strategic Mindsets: Leaders called it a “struggle for grain,” seeing food at the war’s heart.

3. What “Military Grain” Meant in Context

[13:29-15:23]

• In contrast to Allied ration packs, Chinese soldiers relied mostly on unprocessed grains (rice, wheat, millet, maize, beans).
• Grain also referred to fodder for work animals—logistical challenge frequently overlooked.

4. The Strategic Importance of the Yangtze River

[16:22-22:06]

• Initial Role: The Yangtze Delta was a vital, fertile conflict zone.
• After 1938: The Yangtze became a conduit, not just a barrier, crucial for moving grain from Sichuan to the frontlines.
• Civilian Involvement: Civilians hauled and laid mines; river’s militarization melded home front with combat zone.
  • “The Yangtze…demonstrates…the melding of combat lines with the home front, because it literally connected front lines with counties deep in the southwest…” (Yip, [21:25])
• Comparison: Unlike the Volga at Stalingrad, the Yangtze’s role was as a lifeline, not a shield.

5. Pivot in Grain Management and Taxation (1940–1941)

[24:51-31:52]

• System Overhaul: In 1941, Nationalists shifted from cash to in-kind provisioning and centralized land tax collection.
  • Created the Ministry of Grain; grain rather than money collected and distributed.
• Logistical Detail: Handling grain required new systems—inspection, storage, protection from spoilage/rodents.
  • Mundane details (e.g., turning the grain every seven days) had amplified wartime effects.
• Broader Impacts: Centralization expanded the tax base, curbed inflation, and (at least partly) enabled the military to feed itself during a long war.

6. Who Ran the Granaries?

[32:35-34:56]

• Staffing: Mostly local recruits—gentry, literate high school students, ordinary community members.
• Complex Positions: Officials were “both perpetrators and victims,” navigating between implementing state policies and surviving local hardship.

7. The Yiyun (Relay Transport System) and Local Labor

[36:43-43:19]

• Origin & Operation: “Yiyun” was a nationwide system mobilizing local labor and resources (rafts, carts, animals) for military transport.
• Human Cost: Civilians forced into hard labor, often losing tools or animals, sometimes unpaid.
• Administrative Layer: The baojia system administered labor—local heads (baozhang) caught between state demands and the suffering of their own community.
  • “Officials could be both perpetrators and victims of coercion, which was in turn the consequence of the sheer demands of total war.” (Yip, [41:50])

8. Competition and Violence over Grain in Contested Zones

[44:21-50:02]

• Constant Struggle: Nationalists, CCP, and Japanese all competed for grain using strategies like rush purchase, rush transport, blockades.
• Everyday Danger: Civilians in border zones constantly risked forced labor, punishment, or violence.
• Blurring Lines: Struggle for food erased line between civilian and soldier—core to the definition of total war.
  • “It was grain that put people in the most danger, exposed them to the most violence. It wasn’t…battlefield engagements…And I think that’s the essence of total war.” (Yip, [49:32])

9. Rethinking the Nationalist State’s Capacity

[50:42-53:34]

• The book challenges the image of a purely corrupt, inept Nationalist regime.
• Emphasizes their “Herculean mobilization effort” in organizing civilian labor and extracting grain—often at high social cost.
• “To focus on what the government failed to do doesn’t bring us any closer to an explanation of how it survived the war…part of the answer must lie in what the government did manage to do.” (Yip, [51:00])

10. Future Research Directions

[54:05-55:23]

• Yip’s next project: expanding from food to labor mobilization and mass mobilization generally, exploring how regimes in Republican China recruited and organized the population for war and infrastructure.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On food and time:
  “Thinking about food forces you to think about history not by years and months…but by the day, if not by the hour.” — Professor Yip [03:34]
• On China’s total war:
  “China was a belligerent, waging its own distinct version of total war during World War II…a mainly agrarian economy that self-consciously inserted itself into the historical unfolding of total war in practice.” — Professor Yip [11:46]
• On civilian-military boundaries:
  “In this protracted war, there was no meaningful distinction between whether you were a soldier or just a civilian…The struggle for grain meant that you were equally exposed to violence and to death.” — Professor Yip [49:08]
• On the legacy of the Nationalist government:
  “I want to point out that to focus on what the government failed to do doesn’t bring us any closer to an explanation of how it survived the war…” — Professor Yip [51:00]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:53] Yip describes her entry into studying food history in wartime China.
• [05:39] Discussion of why food, not just firepower, was at the heart of China’s total war.
• [13:29] Realities of grain provisioning for Chinese troops vs. US/Allied rations.
• [16:22] The strategic and symbolic importance of the Yangtze River.
• [24:51] Shift to tax in kind and centralization of grain management (1940–41).
• [32:35] Peel back: who managed the granaries, and the routine corruption and hardship.
• [36:43] The personal costs and logistics of the Yiyun labor transport system.
• [44:21] Everyday violence and the politicization of food across battle lines.
• [50:42] Rethinking the Nationalist government—capacity and survival strategies.
• [54:05] Yip previews future research on mass mobilization.

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Tone & Takeaways

The conversation is scholarly yet accessible, engaging with both logistical detail and wider implications, often invoking the perspective of teaching and students. Yip’s tone is precise, empathetic, and deeply attuned to the human consequences of logistical choices in war.

For Listeners:
This episode challenges simplistic narratives about the Second Sino-Japanese War, highlighting the centrality of food, the daily realities of total war, and the remarkable—if costly—organizational feats of the Nationalist regime. The book, and this interview, are highly recommended for anyone interested in war history, logistics, or modern Chinese history.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Mark (Interviewer, New Books Network)]

Hi everyone, and welcome back to New Books in East Asian Studies. This is a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm very fortunate to be joined today by Professor Jennifer Yip from National University Singapore, where Jennifer teaches in the History department. We're here to talk about Jennifer's new book, Grains of the Struggle for Food in China's total war, 1937-1945, which came out just a couple of months ago, now with Cambridge University Press. So, Jennifer, welcome to the New Books Network.

[Professor Jennifer Yip]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Mark (Interviewer, New Books Network)]

For those who haven't come across the book, Grains of Conflict explores the military food systems in China's war of resistance, primarily focusing on the Nationalist military, but also touching on CCP and Japanese occupation forces. It really fills a big hole in our understanding of the war, helps us understand much more about how Nationalist armies operated, the kinds of challenges they've faced, and the kinds of burdens that their food demands imposed on the local population. I really enjoyed reading this book, and it's already helped me think a bit differently about the war's geography, its timings, the layers of the Nationalist war efforts, as well as all the fascinating detail about the food systems. So Jennifer, I wonder if you could start just by telling listeners a little bit more about how you got interested in this topic and, and how the research got off the ground and how it changed as you were. As you were doing that research.

[Professor Jennifer Yip]

Yeah, perfect. Well, first of all, thanks so much, Mark, for the very kind introduction. So I'm a war historian. I've always been interested in both strategic and operational histories, but also in wartime societies and economies. And when I was casting around for a dissertation topic, I found that, you know, with regards to China's war against Japan, I wanted to know how the war was fought, but I also wanted to know how it was lived and experienced. To me, the prosecution of war cannot be extricated from experiences of war. So strategizing for war, of course, impacts the experience of it, but those experiences in turn, necessarily shape strategic outlooks. And so I zeroed in on food because I came to realize that food is one of the best mediums for enmeshing strategic calculations with everyday life. Because provisioning is this. It's on the one hand, the cardinal element of war making. So strategies revolve around how and whether field troops can be fed and kept alive. But on the other hand, it's also this basic human need. Right. Thinking about food forces you to think about history not by years and months, which are the units of time I think most historians are most comfortable with, but by the day, if not by the hour. So that's really how I ended up investigating military grain. It was the linchpin of China's war against Japan. And so studying concerns about grain provisioning helped me to understand the essence of the war and how it was fought. But because it was also what determined life for both soldiers and civilians by the hour. It also helped me to think in a lot of detail about social and economic realities at a much more grassroots level. And I don't think that really changed throughout the process. But I will say that, you know, throughout the years of writing this book, I certainly became much more sensitive to the tragedy and the cruelty of total war.

[Mark (Interviewer, New Books Network)]

Great. Thank you. You started off there by giving a great sense of how food matters in every war, how it connects the everyday with the big strategy. And I wonder if you could tell readers a little bit more thinking about the argument of the book as a whole about food in this particular war, China's war of resistance, why food mattered so much. And then maybe as a follow up, if you could tell readers how you want readers to think a little bit differently about the total war in the book, subtitle the subtitle of the book is China's Total War 37 to 45. So could you tell us how the food fits into that picture of total war?

[Professor Jennifer Yip]

Yeah, of course. So I've always found that it's curious, right, and that we know as a truism of strategy that food is of decisive importance in war. But I think as storytellers, we always look for. We're wired to look for drama and exhilaration, which we will find in the fighting. Conversely, if we ask, what's for lunch? It sounds really pedestrian and really banal, which is why I think questions about food often get overshadowed by questions about combat. But I think because strategic decisions and outcomes have always been shaped by how and whether fighting men can be fed, I thought it was worth honing in on this theme as I tried to investigate China's war against Japan. And I think this truism that food is of this decisive importance in war fighting, was on especially stark display in this conflict. So throughout the book, I argue that this war, whatever you want to call it, the war against Japan, the anti Japanese war of resistance, this conflict was, at its heart, as much a contest for food as one of military conscription or of firepower. And the reason for that is a combination of factors that I don't think occurred anywhere else during World War II. So it was a convergence of several realities. China suffered protracted foreign occupation. Its central government avoided surrender and capitulation, but it was forced into internal exile. So it moved from Nanjing to Chunxing, and it was confronted with not just the rival Japanese regime, but also the Communists, with whom they were sort of in open conflict by 1941. So it was faced with very substantial political challenges, even though it had avoided surrender. And fortunately, China was also a deeply agrarian economy. And to top all of this off, it suffered an almost total international blockade. So it was cut off from external lines of support supply. Now, this combination you won't really find elsewhere. In World War II, even the Soviet Union, which suffered a similar invasion, had a stronger industrial and motorized core, and its central state was stronger and more seasoned. So, you know, as an example, they had tractors. China mostly did not. So as a result of this convergence of factors, all three adversaries, so the Nationalists, the ccp, the Japanese, they mostly turned their energies toward not new, on gaining new territory, but rather on procuring enough food just to keep their armed forces in being. So what I found is that food became prominent in strategic minds, so much so that Chinese leaders from both political camps characterized the war as one of the struggle for grain or the struggle for seizing grain. So clearly those who prosecuted the war were cognizant of the centrality of grain to their survival. So I put total War in the title because I've made a curious observation. The concept of total war, whether as a theory or as a historical phenomenon, has elicited of course much attention. Most of the scholarship centers on Europe and the United States. In the context of conflict in the 20th century, Japan joins this club. Interestingly though, China is mostly invisible in these discussions. So the Chinese experience of war, or in particular of World War II has not been incorporated into these discussions. Now this surprised me because China's war against Japan shows up as a total war in both history and historiography. So historians of this conflict, writing in both English and Chinese, refer to it as a total war. Although this reference is quite casual, there tends not to be a discussion about the consequences of applying this concept to China. But more importantly, China's own historical actors themselves considered their conflict with Japan a total war. So they drew on interwar discourses of total war to make sense of the impeding conflict and during the war itself with the ongoing struggle against Japan. So they were reading clouds of it, were reading to he, they were reading Erich Ludendorff to articulate and to understand the scope of mobilization needed to wage war against Japan. But I want to point out throughout the book that they also understood that China's constitution was different from that of Most World War I belligerents. You know, nations whose quarrels had introduced total war theories to begin with, the us, the uk, outside of Europe and America, Japan, all these nations were know, far more industrialized than China. So what China's historical actors did was to recalibrate the Euro American vision of total war to suit China's agrarian circumstances. So in their version of total war, China would leverage its natural endowments, its people, its massive population and its massive landmass. So in turn her leadership understood that China's abundance and non industrial resources positioned her especially well for a protracted war, a war that was deliberately prolonged to exhaust the enemy, not a war of concentration with the view of forcing a decisive victory. So China's vision of total war was distinct, it was agrarian and it was protracted. And so the reason that's important is that I think it helps us to think very differently about total war in a way that I think is less instinctive to us. So the vision that we have popularly of total war is one of modernity. It's about the industrialized, modernized, Weapons that bleed economies dry, that vastly expand the scope of war to encompass civilians. Air power, for example, was a central determinant of understandings of total war during the interwar period. And so I am by no means the first one or the only one to point out that totality and war should not be conflated with modernization. Serhi Straw and has warned against this act, have a few others. But in my mind the conflation is still quite mainstream because there hasn't been a focus study that has dedicated itself to illustrating that this conflation does not stand up to empirical observation. And so it's precisely for this reason that I think China deserves a central place in discussions of World War II as a total war. We don't need to go back in time to the 19th century. We don't need to turn to asymmetrical warfare to challenge the conflation of total war with modern war. China was a belligerent, waging its own distinct version of total war during World War II, which is the paradigmatic example of total war right here was a mainly agrarian economy that self consciously inserted itself into the historical unfolding of total war in practice. And so that's why I put it into the subtitle because I think that's a major contribution to the understanding of a fundamental concept in strategy.

[Mark (Interviewer, New Books Network)]

Thanks, Jennifer, that's great. We're going to turn in a moment to looking at some of the particular chapters and details within the book. But just before we do, I wonder if I could ask you one more quick question, maybe to help listeners who don't know so much about China's war with Japan. When we talk about food and grain in this conflict, what is it actually that we're talking about? I suppose when you think of Second World War and food, it's maybe us, US soldiers with sort of very scientific freeze dried rations and things. But I guess the situation in China is quite different.

[Professor Jennifer Yip]

That's exactly right. So because China didn't have the resources or the technology to, you know, produce their own version of Caveatians or sea rations. Right. A lot of most of the soldiers relied on, on different kinds of grain in their most, you know, unprocessed form. So the Chinese word for grain, so for military grain, so is not specific about the type of grain. Generally soldiers ate rice, but depending on the region in which they were stationed, they were given wheat, millet flour, maize. They were also given beans and legumes. And you know, for the record, Jinyoung. So military grain also refers to the fodder that needed to be provided for the work animals associated with military logistics. And they shouldn't be forgotten because they chomped on an impressive amount of hay or wheat bran a day. And any logistician would tell you that fodder is their nightmare, is very voluminous. It's difficult to transport, but it's absolutely essential. So the provisioning scene in China was vastly different from that which I think might be more familiar to your American audiences. It didn't come neatly packaged in a serration. It wasn't processed to be fortified against the elements. This was probably grain in a basket that would be steamed and then eaten, ideally with a little bit of salt, maybe with a couple of supplementary foods like vegetables. But I think that was very much the best case scenario. More often than not, it was far worse than that. And grain spoils very easily. And that was the sort of being of the Chinese logistician throughout the war.

[Mark (Interviewer, New Books Network)]

Thank you very much. Thanks. I'm going to turn to ask you a couple of questions on chapter one now. Sorry, yeah, chapter one after the introduction. Chapter one. And this actually is, relates to my own teaching on this because this, this chapter focuses on the importance of the lower and particularly the middle Yangtze region. And when I teach the war with my undergraduate students, we talk a lot about the Yangtze river in the first couple of weeks of the class, really up until about the fall of Wuhan in. In the fall of 1938. And after that, we tend to forget about it. We don't really mention the river or the region again. But having read chapter one of your book, I'm going to have to rewrite my syllabus. I think and think a bit differently about the geography of the war. So I wonder if you could tell listeners why the Yangtze was so important in the conflict both in 1938 and then for the rest of the war afterwards.

[Professor Jennifer Yip]

Yeah, great. Thanks so much, Marc. Yeah. I do find that whenever I teach about the war, invariably I do have to pull up a map of the Yangtze. So the Yangtze played an elevated strategic role in the war precisely because it was prolonged after 1938. It was prolonged by design. So, of course, as you mentioned, in the early phase of the war, the Chinese and Japanese clashed over the Yangtze Delta is really agriculturally productive, fertile portion of China. So there the Yangtze's centrality is clear. But even after the fall of Wuhan In October of 1938, the Yangtze and its tributaries continue to serve as a connecting thread between the Nationalists home front in Sichuan Province and its first lines of defense against the Japanese. So to me, its most important role was that it was able to carry grain to military consumers. It was a conduit for nutrition and for foodstuffs. And investigating food highlights the river's significance as a life giving power. So in the first year of the war, it's important in the most obvious way. The Japanese use it to advance deeper into China. And so to prevent the Japanese advance deeper into the Chinese interior, the navy sets up defenses at choke points on the river. You know, they employ torpedoes and mines and artillery fire. After 1938, the nationalists established an upriver defense force to block further westward advancements by the Japanese. And something that I didn't know until I conducted research for this chapter was that this defense entailed guerrilla warfare. So this entailed mainly laying mines behind enemy lines. But the only way to do this was to recruit extensive sensitive assistance from the local population that lived along the banks of the Yangtze. It was these civilians who helped naval personnel haul these really unwieldy mines up the difficult terrain that's flying to the Yangtze. And they were also the ones who rode these mines out to be laid in the river. So I found some pretty exciting, ultimately sobering stories about how civilians were drawn into these very dangerous efforts along the river, sometimes with quite disastrous or fatal consequences. Another reason that the Yangtze is important is because it serves as this geographical orienting device. So In June of 1940, the City of Yichang falls to the Japanese. Yichang sits on the left bank of the Yangtze. It's east of the Three Gorges, it's sort right in the heart of the country. And so its loss to the Japanese was disastrous for the Nationalists. Losing Yichang meant that the China theater had been cut in half and that the Nationalist rear zone in the southwest was now cut off from agriculturally productive parts of central and eastern China. And so geographically, it also meant that the Three Gorges area was now the linchpin of the Nationalist defense. Yichang was about the furthest that the Japanese ever got into the Chinese interior until sometime in 1944. So the Nationalists for the rest of the war reoriented their grain provision strategies to adjust to this new reality. And in this chapter, I focus on the sixth war zone, which encompass the Three Gorges area. And it traces how the troops stationed in this war zone struggled to coordinate the resources required to transport grain along the Yangtze and its tributaries in a safe and timely fashion. So shipping was a huge economic problem. The Relevant ministry organs, state organs like the Ministry of Transport, their army rear services department clashed with shipping gold. And civilian boatmen who were struggling with inflation understood that their services were very important and so tried to bargain for better working conditions. And the difficulty of marshaling resources to deliver grain along the Yangtze in this war zone really turned out to be a microcosm of logistical challenges throughout the rest of an occupied China. So by focusing on food, I found that the Yangtze was deeply militarized for most of the war, by which I mean not only that hostilities took place on and along the river, but also that the river featured, you know, large scale and indispensable civilian participation in the war effort, voluntary and otherwise. I think it's the Yangtze that demonstrates, you know, the melding of combat lines with the home front, because it literally connected front lines with counties deep in the southwest that had until recently been quite far removed from centers of power. And suddenly they were playing this pivotal role in the war effort. As far as I know, no other river in World War II is similarly militarized, certainly not in such a sustained manner. So the Volga river comes to mind because it played such a pivotal role in the Battle of Stalingrad. But even then, its function was different, right? It was a natural barrier that the Germans never managed to cross. The Yangtze wasn't primarily a barrier. It was a conduit. Its role was in circulating foodstuffs to keep armies from being. And so in that way, I think it plays a different role than many other river bodies in World War II.

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[Mark (Interviewer, New Books Network)]

Yeah, that's right. I think it's so, so different from the Yellow River. You know, most, most studies thinking about rivers during China's war with Japan have really been about the Yellow river and Yellow river flood of 1938. But this, this chapter really helps us think differently about the role of rivers in the war. You mentioned there, the fall of Ichang in 1940. And that I think helps us think about the transition from the first years of the war to a change in the nationalist strategy that you talk about. Fascinating detail in chapter two and chapter three of the book. Chapter two is about grain management and military supply. And then chapter three thinks about the question of storage of grain and the granary systems that were being set up. So they go together very well, partly because they talk about a fascinating pivot in the war in the last months of 1940 and perhaps particularly in 1941. So I wonder if you could explain why you hone in on that particular period as a pivotal year in the long War. How was it that the Nationalist government changed their grain strategy and their tax strategy?

[Professor Jennifer Yip]

Yeah, of course, I'm not going to lie. These chapters were quite hard to write and research because organizations kept changing. It was hard to keep track of who was doing what. But I think that detail was necessary for, like you said, demonstrating some of the key mechanisms of military green provisioning. So in my mind, 1941 and maybe the latter half of 1940 were pivotal because they represented a change in how Nationalist armies would be provisioned. So in mid-1940, the government moves towards provisioning soldiers in kind rather than in cash. And in 1941, land tax policy underwent two key changes. So firstly, it was centralized, meaning that it was no longer under the auspices of provincial governments, but the prerogative of the central state. So the central state was now responsible for collecting land tax. The Ministry of Grain was established as the main state organ that would centralize and oversee the collection and distribution of grain. So an earlier bureau had been established in 1940, but it was not very effective, and so it was replaced by the Ministry of Grain. The second important change was that land Tax would now be collected in kind rather than in cash. And the collection of land tax in kind came under the joint purview of the ministries of grain and finance. So later on, and I discussed this in a bit more detail, this policy alone became insufficient to meet the needs of the war. And so the government added on new methods of grading procurement to supplement land tax requisitionary purchase, which later became requisitionary borrowing. So basically, the enforced purchase and borrowing of grain from the populations. But the centralization and collection of land tax in the LATTER Half of 1941 was important for three reasons. So firstly, it enlarged the central government's tax base. Leaving it in the hands of provincial authorities meant that the central government couldn't capture and capitalize on China's most abundant resource, which was land. And secondly, it served as an anti inflationary measure. So if grain went directly into the government's hands, the government didn't have to spend these exorbitant amounts of money to purchase grain for the armies and the civil service. And that in turn meant that they no longer had to print these exorbitant amounts of money and impose inflationary pressures on the market. And finally, it augmented military grain provisioning. So, as I said in 1940, the government moved towards distributing the actual things, so grain to soldiers, rather than entrusting them to buy grain locally with cash. So in this context, with the implementation of land tax in kind in 1941, as this key mechanism to provide armies with the grain they needed, granaries assumed a new strategic importance. So land revenue was the economic determinant of the central government's wealth. But granaries were the infrastructural, physical limiting factor, right? Whether or not grain could be effectively collected and transported and stored was a function of the robustness of the granary system. So the Ministry of Grain newly established, recognized this and it moved to strengthen and standardize the construction and operation of grain storage facilities. So in chapter three, I traced the the challenges of granary construction. But aside from concerns about inflation, about the difficulty of gathering material and the manpower needed to build sturdy granary facilities, I also tried to piece together the processes and protocols that surrounded the granary. So, for example, how did officials receive and inspect the grain delivered by civilians as tax? How did they store it? How did they protect it? How was grain taken care of while it was being transported from point A to point B? And if the grain was compromised or it was lost, as it very often was, who did the system tend to blame? So I was interested in these sort of the nitty gritty of procedures surrounding the granary as a state establishment. So this approach to granaries differs from the more popular economic one. So scholars have explored better than I ever could how granaries throughout China's imperial histories have acted as stabilizing economic mechanisms, as relief mechanisms in times of crisis. I am more interested not in their economic function in times of peace, but rather in the elevated importance they have to an agrarian state at war. And I'm also interested in a way, I think most people are not in the daily occurrences around and within the granary. So again, it's the little things that matter, right? Granaries were where grain was inspected for its quality and where its quality was ideally protected against the elements. The procedures around accepting or rejecting grain delivered by civilians or by other institutions and agencies had very real and immediate effects on both combatant and civilians. So if a local granary, for example, rejected the grain offered by a taxpayer because it didn't meet quality control standards, the taxpayer suffered. If a granary, however, lowered its quality control standards or failed to keep grain from turning bad, then soldiers ended up with moldy rice or rice that had little or no, no nutrition. So all of these little things, you know, have you turned over the grain every seven to ten days? Have you kept out rodents and insects? Things like these that seem incredibly mundane ended up having, you know, really amplified effects on China's ability to stay in the war effort. So to me, 1941 is pivotal because it represents how the Nationalist government rolled out nationwide provisioning strategies in recognition of the fact that they were now trying to keep in a long war with at the time, no end in sight. The English language scholarship on the China theater tends to emphasize Allied aid, especially US Aid. But historic alliances aside, I think it's also important to note that the government was working to reorganize its own resources.

[Mark (Interviewer, New Books Network)]

Thank you. I think that gives us a great sense of the pros and the cons of that shift in strategy in 1941. Again, when I'm teaching this, I have a slide in the lecture about the shift to land tax in kind. But I'd never quite thought through the challenges that that came with that and all the systems and structures that had to be put in place to even make that possible. If I could just ask a quick follow up question about the granaries. Jennifer, I wonder if you could tell listeners a little bit about who the people were who were staffing these granaries. Who was responsible for them and I mean, how did they land the job?

[Professor Jennifer Yip]

Yeah, so I try to track them down in chapters two and three because I was also curious, who are these officials and how exactly what kind of job interview did they have to go through? So what I found, I have to say, really bits and pieces, but it seems that they could either be recruited locally, as was often the case for a state that was scrambling for any resources they could get depends on from the local population. So they could either be the local gentry. I have seen documents saying that high school students, you know, who were literate and could do calculations, were also roped in to help at some point. There are instances where, well, actually most of the time the officials tended to be recruited from amongst the local community. And so there were also cases of graft, of corruption. Although I also mentioned in the book several times that these officials were also people. And as much as the corruption and ineptitude were stark realities, some of their choices must also be understood in the context of this daily struggle for survival. And it may have been the only way that they could get their hands on enough to feed themselves and their families. So I think the complicating factor is that more often than not, these officials were local people. Not always, but it was often the case. And it was a complicating factor because they then had to navigate this unenviable possession of being a state representative, but also being one of the community on whom they were imposing these state policies.

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[Mark (Interviewer, New Books Network)]

Yeah, and I think this question of food helps bring an extra dimension to. You know, there's a very rich scholarship on state society relations in China, maybe especially in the mid 20th century, and this is a fascinating example of those who are caught in the middle, who are facing both ways. And actually that's maybe a good jumping off point to think about. Chapter four so Chapter four shifts attention to the Yiyun, the wartime transport system using human labor that was enacted by the Nationalists during the war. So I wonder if you could tell listeners what that system was and just what it was like for those who were a part of it.

[Professor Jennifer Yip]

Yeah, so I really enjoyed writing this chapter. My discovery of it was entirely serendipitous. I stumbled upon one article that made casual mention of Yiyun, and it all sort of unraveled from there. To clarify, Chinese language scholars have written about it, but I only connected with that scholarship after I learned about Yiyun through the primary sources. So Yiyun was a relay transport system. It had its roots in imperial times. This was something the government never failed to mention because this, you know, this historicity seemed to lend the practice some kind of legitimacy. But the wartime EAN system was clearly reconfigured in both practice and rhetoric to suit the needs of the wartime state. So by 1940, the government had established relay transport, so Yiyun, as a sort of nationwide transportation system. It formed a main management office which came under the control of the Ministry of Transportation. And the relay system was founded upon local civilian mobilization. It was founded entirely on local resources, on local labor, but also local transport tools, rafts, boats, carts, work animal. So generally able bodied men were conscripted to provide labor for Yiyun. This was the same pool of men who were expected to answer the call for military conscription if that call ever came around. So EU labor or EU duty entailed carrying loads of, if this was a porter carrying loads of 30-40kg for standard mileage on land of about 25km a day. So officially they weren't meant to travel too far away from home, although in practice this was often the case. A series of stations of Een stations along established yin routes were meant to provide food, laundry and medical care along the way. So this was probably something I should have mentioned in response to your previous question, but recruitment for Yiyun fell into the hands of a unit known as the Fao Jia, and this was really the case for virtually every other wartime mobilization program. So the Baziao was an administrative unit that comprised anywhere between 10 and 100 households, depending on the locality. Historically, it was associated with revenue calculation, household registration, but also it also had a local security function. The Baozhang, or the heads of the Bao unit, were in effect, grassroots leaders who mediated policies from provincial and central governments with grassroots communities. They were the ones who were tasked with facilitating tax collection, with meeting army recruitment quotas, and in this case, meeting labor quotas as well. So I think my research points to a consensus that having to work in the E system was not great. Civilians themselves were often victimized by the e UN system. They could be forced to travel far away from home. They could be poorly paid or not paid at all. Their transport tools, their boats, or their work animals, which were very precious to their livelihoods, could be lost or damaged in the process, and there was very little recourse for these losses, and many ended up fleeing mid journey. So to me, Lee Yun epitomized the difficulty of marshaling resources across this vast agrarian landscape. So of course, the Bao Tia has been excoriated in the scholarship in general as a manifestation of rampant corruption. And certainly during the war, the Baotia definitely did not receive good press, and its role in requisitioning labor for Yi Yuan really didn't help their cause. But I do point out that the Baozia themselves were in this unenviable position between the state and grassroots society. They had to implement state policies. That was their job. But these state policies were always about taking and not giving at the same time. They were also answerable to the communities in which they were embedded. So civilians who formed the backbone of these mobilization schemes, they suffered. But the system also tended to victimize those who had to implement the system at the most localized social levels. And this is something that I discuss in Chapter two as well. So going back to your previous question about the officials involved in various stages of collecting land tax in kind, in trying to track down the middling and the lower levels of the bureaucracy, we find that the system, it victimized the population, but it also cannibalized its own workers, especially the ones at the bottom who didn't really have much power or influence. So officials could be both perpetrators and victims of coercion, which was in turn the consequence of the sheer demands of total war. And we also find that there could be conscientious individuals in a generally corrupt system, right? There were architects or Visionaries of Yiyun, for example, who were, I think, quite sincere about trying to improve working conditions for eating workers or providing them with medical and other types of benefits. So I think this is important for something that I'm trying to argue by example throughout the book, that the technicalities of provisioning of logistics bring us closer to exactly how the demands of total war materialized in people's lives. Whether they were state representatives or they were just ordinary civilians. I think assessments of how the Nationalist government fared in wartime, treated in the singular, it tends to be portrayed as a monolith. But in truth, the Nationalist wartime machine was anything but. It was this mass of humans who all harbored their own motives and varying degrees of loyalty and belonging to this arbitrary concept of the state.

[Mark (Interviewer, New Books Network)]

Yeah, that's very true. Yeah, that's a very good point. And again, the reason I keep mentioning teaching is I'm teaching a class on this at the moment and my students keep drawing up long lists of what the China central government could and should have done differently. A kind of 10 point plan for where Chiang Kai Shek messed things up. But it's really not so easy. The last chapter of the book brings us back towards the frontline areas and the contested areas of the conflict. And I really enjoyed this chapter because it gives this very rich sense of how the whole conflict turned into this multi sided struggle for access to grain. So thinking about that last chapter, I wonder if you could give listeners a sense of the different strategies that Nationalist armies and maybe the CCP adopted within that struggle for grain. And how does that help us think a little bit differently about the war as a whole as the long years of this eight year conflict dragged on?

[Professor Jennifer Yip]

Yeah, absolutely. So this was actually the first chapter I wrote because the sources that I first came across left a very deep impression on me that armed conflict seemed to be incredibly ordinary. It was just part of everyday life. And so writing at first, I think was what really sensitized me to the historic worth of the everyday. And so that sort of set the tone for how I went about the rest of the book. So the chapter explores the low level, simmering, scattered violence that accompany the manipulation of green flows by the three belligerents in their bid to outlast each other. It focuses on contested regions, so the areas around the borders between Chinese and Japanese controlled territories, because in these areas infiltration, deception, raiding, ambushing, blockading, all these strategies defined not just military activity, but civilian life and prospects for survival. And at the heart of all of this action was the need for Grain. So the chapter really serves to underscore the ubiquity of constant and low level violence. Firstly, of course, by looking at guerrilla warfare, but also secondly by looking at strategies employed by all sides to draw grains into their own hands and out of the enemies. So rush purchasing, for example, was the attempt to outbid other sides by offering higher prices for a large amount of local grain. So this had immediate and major effects on local grain markets. It was also closely linked to currency issues across different zones because the Nationalists, Communists and the Japanese or the reorganized national government zones all issued their own currencies. Another strategy was rush transportation, which was exactly what it sounds like. It was the rush transportation of grain out of enemy reach, especially in response to to hostilities. So because this was normally an emergency measure, local civilians were recruited or coerced into performing this task. And of course, blockades and embargoes were a favorite strategy amongst all three. The Japanese tried to engage the Communists by building strong points, stone walls, fortifications to prevent the outflow of goods. Two communist controlled areas at the same time. Despite all the effort put into erecting ground boundaries, they turned out to be incredibly porous. And smuggling was still rampant. People moved constantly between zones to pursue what they calculated to be their best chances of survival. So there was still quite a lot of movement of both people and goods. So all these endeavors were laced with violence. Right. Rush transporting was extremely dangerous because it of course took place amidst hostilities. The Japanese and the rng, the reorganized national government, which was the Japanese controlled regime based in Nan, frequently coerced civilians into helping them seize and transport grain from their fellow Chinese. And sometimes the Japanese would go out into the field themselves and physically loot fresh harvest. Breaching blockades was a serious offense under the Nationalists as it was under the Japanese. The Japanese showed no mercy to any civilian who was suspected of defying their blockades. And in fact, and I go into a little bit of detail in the chapter, anyone who was deemed to have aided the enemy by enabling the outflow of grain, right? This incredibly precious central resource ran the risk of being labeled Han Xian or a traitor to the nation, Right? That's the most direct translation. And this label had fatal consequences. It was a hefty crime, but it also meant that someone often faced execution or other severe repercussions. So these low level tussles for food across free and occupied borders amongst these three belligerents meant that everyday life was dangerous, it was unpredictable, it was constantly and invariably violent. Right? So this was the reality of China's total war of Nationalist CCP and Japanese authorities all enacted green policies that thrust ordinary people right into the heart of conflict. It was grain that put people in the most danger, exposed them to the most violence. It wasn't, you know, large battlefield engagements. And I think that's the essence of total war. Right. Especially when waged in agrarian conditions. Total war is not just or mainly about the soldiers. It's about civilians. Right. That is one of the definitions of total war, that there is no longer any distinction, meaningful distinction, distinction between combatant and civilian. And I think, again, focusing on grain really brings that out because in this protracted war, there was no meaningful distinction between whether you were a soldier or just a civilian who happened to be living in the contested zone. The struggle for grain meant that you were equally exposed to violence and to death.

[Mark (Interviewer, New Books Network)]

Yeah. And in a way, the really startling thing about that last chapter of the book is just the sheer scale of it. The tens and millions, tens of millions of civilians who were living in these contested zones and under threat from these different grain strategies from all the belligerents coming towards the end of our time now. But I was just wondering if you had any final thoughts coming back to this question of the Nationalist government. I was wondering if you had any final thoughts on how you think readers of the book will be thinking a little bit differently about China's central government. Having read Grains of Conflict, yeah.

[Professor Jennifer Yip]

This is something that your students, I think, have picked up on. So I think that I hope that the book will move readers beyond what I think still is the predominant impression of the wartime Nationalist regime. Right. That. Which is that it was hopelessly corrupt, inept, incapable of waging an effective war effort. Now, to be clear, clear, the book is not meant to be a defense of the regime. Right. The book is full of examples of organizational deficiencies and failures, abuses of power. But I want to point out that to focus on what the government failed to do doesn't bring us any closer to an explanation of how it survived the war. This is the fact with which we are confronting. Right. How did it overcome all of these incredible odds to immediately eventually emerge victorious? And I think part of the answer must lie in what the government did manage to do. So I argue that the government pulled off this Herculean mobilization effort. It organized civilian population around the imperative of procuring and circulating grain. It was both able and willing to impose immense sacrifice and suffering on its society in the name of national survival. Now, these provisioning policies exposed them politically. It certainly did not endear them to the millions of people whose lives they turned upside down. But strategically and organizationally, it served its purpose. Right? So among other Hans van de Ven, Rana Mitter, they've urged us to take more seriously the Nationalist government's programs of state building and citizen welfare. And these groundbreaking studies mostly concentrate on the wartime capitals of Wuhan and Chongqing. So these are urban environments in which the government could enact specific kinds of welfare policies. I view grain provisioning efforts as testimony to what really was a surprising capacity to organize resources. And importantly, I think these provisioning efforts prove that the government strove to exercise this capacity beyond urban centers in the vast expanse of non urbanized, rural, agriculturally productive, free China. And the fact remains that this system held, however tenuously, and it was a major factor in helping China through the war. So to me, at least part of the answer, certainly not all of it, but part of the answer to how did China survive the war must lie in this ability to organize internal resources, in this case, civilians and grain.

[Mark (Interviewer, New Books Network)]

Thanks, Jennifer. That's. That's great. And it does. Yeah. I think the book is really good at capturing this vicious cycle for the Nationalists, where their successes are also the things that annoy people and that worsen state society relations. It's a bit hard to know how they could have broken that cycle. If I could just ask you one more quick question before we wrap up. And that's just what you've been working on since finishing Grains of Conflict. Are you picking up on any of the similar themes in your new research?

[Professor Jennifer Yip]

Yeah, so I think I'm always going to be interested in how states organize the resources they need to wage war, because war is this incredible commitment. Right. It can make and or break economies. So my next project is in keeping with this theme, but I think I'm going to move beyond food to examine mass mobilization more generally. So more specifically, I'm investigating currently the role of labor mobilization in Chinese foreign politics, not just during the war, but more broadly, from the 1920s through to World War II. And I think mass mobilization is a good way of helping me probe directly one of modern China's most salient themes, which is how competing political regimes try to mobilize civilian populations at the grassroots level, especially for military and infrastructural purposes, but also for political mobilization and indoctrination. So it's certainly tangentially related to Grains of Conflict, but I think I'm going to move away from grain to look at mobilization more generally as this sort of all encompassing endeavor during the Republican Chinese period.

[Mark (Interviewer, New Books Network)]

Yeah, And I think that's going to be a really interesting way of thinking about some of the continuities running from the 20s, 30s through to the 1940s. I think certainly I have a bit of a tendency to wall off the wartime period, when actually lots of this has much deeper roots. Well, I think we're just about out of time, so thank you very much, Jennifer, for joining us on the New Books Network.

[Professor Jennifer Yip]

Thanks so much for having me. Yeah.

[Mark (Interviewer, New Books Network)]

Yeah. Thank you. And for listeners, it's much recommended to get your hands on a copy of Grains of Conflict as soon as you can. That's from Cambridge University Press. And we look forward to seeing you next time on the podcast. Thank you very much.