Barak Kushner, Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 403 pp. $45.00 Unavailable

Barak Kushner promises an examination of the transition from war to peace by studying the repercussions of bringing Japan to justice after its surrender. He focuses on the Chinese legal approach to Japanese war crimes, the Japanese response, and the impact on Sino-Japanese relations in the early Cold War (pp. 3–4). He shows that both the Kuomintang (KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek in Nationalist China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Mao Zedong in the People's Republic of China (PRC) were lenient to those adjudicated. This is surprising given the horrific nature of the crimes committed. Kushner argues that the KMT chose leniency in order to demonstrate moral superiority over Japan and to legitimate the authority of its own government. Leniency also reflected the KMT's growing preoccupation with a civil war that it was losing. The trials in the PRC took place a decade later and also used leniency to...