This chapter highlights how low-level tussles for food replaced large-scale engagements as the main mode of conflict among the Nationalists, CCP, and Japanese. In regions of military contestation, namely guerrilla war zones, civilians participated extensively in two endeavors common to all sides: procurement (acquiring grain) and protection (ensuring that grain did not fall into enemy hands). All three main belligerents attempted to control the flow of grain across ambiguous boundaries through blockades and the rush-transportation and rush-purchase of food. These practices dominated everyday civilian life and were invariably laced with violence. The daily threat of food-related bloodshed forced most ordinary Chinese to go to drastic lengths to survive the protracted three-way struggle. Such grim prospects reveal the limitations of nationalism and collaborationism as explanations for wartime behavior, even though Nationalist and CCP propaganda weaponized the “hanjian” label against each other. The moralization of collaboration and resistance in both scholarly work and popular memory has overshadowed the mundaneness of survival.