A Springboard to Victory

Did the Chinese Communists use money or banking systems during their struggle for national power? In the West, this question was not answered, or even raised, for sixty years after the Communists took over China in 1949. This book examines the Communists’ revenue and supply system during the Japanese occupation in Shandong, a coastal province in northern China. It explores how the Communists manipulated currency exchange rates to turn trade within the occupied zones into their principal source of revenue and transform the Japanese army and navy into their most important customers. Thus enabling them to stockpile the materials needed for the race against the Nationalists into Manchuria, China’s only industrialized area, immediately after Japan’s surrender.

Sherman Xiaogang Lai, Ph.D. (2008) in History, Queen’s University at Kingston, M.A. (2002) Royal Military College of Canada, is a Research Associate in the Leverhulme China’s War with Japan Programme, University of Oxford. He is a former officer of the Chinese army and served in China’s Vietnam War.

"Lai provides a pioneering account of the Communists' banking institutions in wartime Shandong."
Gregor Benton, Cardiff University, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 71, No. 4 (November 2012)

"Lai understands the province in ways that only a native son can do. He creates a picture of the misery and despair of the wartime period, and of the desperate fight of much of the local population to get rid of a hated occupier...The kind of detailed, meticulous work that Lai has done, based on a deep familiarity with a region and the institution he is working on (Lai served in the People's Liberation Army) is a model for a deeper understanding of the complex and often contradictory process by which the CCP came to power."
Diana Lary, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, Pacific Affairs Volume 86 No. 1 (March 2013)