China Centre Conversation with
Hans van de Ven (University of Cambridge), China at War (2017) and
Eugenie Buchan (Independent Scholar), A Few Planes for China (2017)
Millions died and tens of millions became refugees during World War II in China. Yet the Chinese theatre of World War II is one of the least-known in the global history of the war. Join us for this event with two major scholars of this period discussing their new books and asking how much China made a difference to the eventual Allied victory in 1945.

Hans van de Ven is Professor of Modern Chinese History at the University of Cambridge. Educated in the Netherlands at Leiden University and in the USA at Harvard, he is an expert on the history of nineteenth and twentieth century China. He has written on China’s military history as well as the history of China’s globalization. Publications include China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China, 1937‒1945 (London, Profile, 2017 and Harvard UP 2018); Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global; Origins of Modernity in China (New York, Columbia UP, 2014); Negotiation China’s Destiny in WWII, editor, with Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); The Battle for China, editor with Mark Peattie and Edward Drea (Stanford University Press, 2010), winner of the 2012 Distinguished Book Award, Society for Military History.

Eugenie Maechling Buchan grew up in Washington DC where she worked for the American Petroleum Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the 1980s. She is co-author of The Critical Link: Energy and National Security in the 1980s (1982) one of the early studies on US energy security. She has worked as a speech-writer, energy analyst and journalist in London, Brussels and Paris.