| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Xu Guoqi. China and the Great War: China's Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization. (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 316. $80.00.
The frequency with which new analyses of World War I continue to appear must startle even the most zealous aficionados. Since Paul Fussell's classic, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), examinations of personal experience, memory, and cultural impact have attracted particular attention. But orthodox studies of specific battles, war aims, and leadership endure, the best of which take an explicitly comparative approach. Among the more interesting new investigations of the military/diplomatic/political dimensions of the Great War are tales of developments far away from the principal theater of the western front.	1
Xu Guoqi's book is one of these notable new titles. Although not the first English-language study to examine China during the 1914–1919 years, it is the only one to do so primarily from the perspective of Chinese war aims. Thomas E. LaFargue (China and the World War [1937]) and Madeleine Chi (China Diplomacy, 1914–1918 [1970]) long ago canvassed the British, American, and Japanese diplomatic record to tell a tale of hapless Chinese leadership incapable or unwilling to advance China's interests on the international stage. By contrast, Xu mines diplomatic documents from archives in China, Taiwan, Britain, France, Germany, and the United States—plus the public discussion of a new Chinese "foreign policy public" found in more than twenty-five Chinese and English-language periodicals published in China, Britain, and the United States—to return a sense of agency to wartime Chinese diplomacy.	. . .

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