This book may seem to be two books in one. In the first, we are given a cogent, superbly researched description of the creation of the Nationalist Army, of its later history in the reunification of China (1926–1937) and then of its fate during the War of Resistance (1937–1945). In the second book, a European scholar undermines one of the icons of the US presence in China, Joseph Stilwell, the salty, profane commander of US forces in China during the War, whose scathing denunciations of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists set the stage for holding Chiang's incompetence and Nationalist corruption responsible for the Communist victory in China.

At first glance the second story might seem a sidebar to the larger topic of the book – war and nationalism in China. But it turns out to be integral to Western academic understanding of modern China. Views of the War of Resistance were so conditioned by Stilwell and his protagonists (what van de Ven calls the Stilwell–White paradigm, referring to Theodore White whose writings made Stilwell a hero) to accept that the Nationalists were the authors of their own downfall that there has been no room for an examination of where the Nationalists were seriously weakened – on the battlefields fighting the Japanese invaders.