I bought it as introductory text on modern history of Japan and Korea from the perspective of historians from these countries.
Firstly I must say, the visual presentation of this book is very good. There are lots of nice pictures and photos and the text is very easy to read.
At a time I was into travelling and travel guides such as the Lonely Planets. A good way to find out whether a particular set of travel guides is any good is to read the one on a place you are familiar with.
So I read the part on the 2nd Sino-Japanese War). There was no mention of the Xian Incident. The cynic in me tells me that there was a political agenda behind this major omission, considering that all the Chinese historians on this project were from the Communist China. So take this book with a large grain of salt.
To Kit in his radio programme The Summit talked about the WWII history a couple of weeks back. He was saying that the history of this period is being suppressed by the CCP (the CCP armed forces were never under the direct control of the KMT, and for a long period they buggered off into the Soviet Union “to preserve their strength”, so there really wasn’t much to say about their role in the war) as well as the Taiwanese (the DDP doesn’t care, and the KMT is too marginalized and too busy fighting the DDP).
The bottom line is, without freedom of expression, you don’t even have the facts.