THE FORGOTTEN NATION IN THE ALLIES: CHINA IN WORLD WAR II

Jinwen Wu
Ms. Wu, CHINA, 2517577324@qq.com

Abstract

To what extent are small states negligible in international politics? Conventional theories of the post-World War II era, such as neorealism, focus on the power balance among great powers and conceptualize small states as minor players. This study questions this understanding and re-examines the role of what is considered to be “small states” in international politics. Specifically, I examine the cases of China and the United States during World War II.

China’s involvement in WWII accelerated the decolonization process and helped contain fascism in Asia, both being contributions that proved consequential for post-war settlements. In detail, the study focuses on the Sino-Japanese conflicts, which lasted for centuries, to derive power from multiple schools of thought including how past interaction made collaboration fail and how the assessed cost of war prevents a nation from entangling in war. Because of the innovation of such subtly combined methodology and ideology proposed in the essay, scholars can better predict the future and estimate the past. Another crucial purpose of the piece is to call scholars to give enough credits to the developing country so that the results of future political studies would be applied to more extensive fields of societal and political studies. The implications of these findings are new methods for measuring a nation’s strategical importance in war and weighing different countries’ roles in wars of large scale, which not only supplement existing euro-centric history studies but also pave the way for making in-depth inference form turmoil and post-war settlements. The essence of war studies is learning the development and functioning of human society. From the study of World War II, a period of anarchy, I propose a new way of analysis, which includes both the abstract and the quantitative features through case studies and logical deduction.

Keywords: World War II, historical research, eastern perspective