The greater part of China’s hard-won modernization was destroyed, including most of the rail network, sealed highways, and industrial plants created in the first decades of the twentieth century: 30 percent of the infrastructure in the rich Pearl River delta near Canton, 52 percent in Shanghai, and a staggering 80 percent in the capital, Nanjing.9 The war would undo two empires in China (the British and the Japanese) and help to create two more (the American and the Soviet).
