China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation

by Chen Jian

Through the use of recently released Chinese documents, conversations with People's Republic of China scholars, and in-depth interviews with people who were present at key decision-making meetings, this book aims to discover China and the USSR's roles in the outbreak of the Korean conflict.

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction, Military Fiction, War, Asia, International Relations

339 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Bachir El · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book to understand the context in which China intervened in the Korean War, talks deeply about the importance of the ideology and the security reasons behind the intervention and focus greatly in first hand testimony from leaders such as Mao or Zhou enlai, and other leaders such as Stalin, Khrushchev or Truman. Really interesting, although condensed and with lots of facts and dates it keep itself easy to read.
Bad points: at some points it gets repetitive with certain facts and you feel you are reading the same over and over.

[Meihan Liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 at best. Given the fact that this book was published twenty years ago, the scope of it is too limited but the lack of resources on the Chinese side, so he has to spend way to0 many pages discussing ideology's role behind the forging the "lean-towards-one-side" foreign policy of the Chinese Communist Party at the very end of the civil war. With the (periodical and temporary) opening of Chinese MFA's archives, the declassification of relevant Russian documents and more memoirs of the American foreign service people in China during the Sino-Japanese War or civil war who were lated purged as a result of the upsurging McCarthyism coming out, it occurs to me that all parties in this story (well not sure about the KMT) were playing double games. No such thing as "leaning towards one side" was predestined.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author challenges some assumptions academics have made regarding whether the US was primarily responsible for China's entry into the Korean War. He bases his assumption on various records that became available as well as open sources that provide insight into the ideology and assumptions of the Communist regime that they assumed a confrontation with the US would come on the Pacific rim. Also, China's crossing the Yalu was not in response to the US crossing the 38th Parallel under MacArthur. They had already been socializing the idea of confronting the US with the Soviets prior. The book is a useful corrective to the standard history.

[Eleanore · Rating 3 out of 5]

A succinct, but clear portrait of the emergence of Communist China from the Civil War, the initial chords in the development of Mao's regime and the first fraught interactions with the United States. Chen Jian delivers a nuanced understanding of a state as defined by a man: proactive, ambitious, ideological and above-all, revolutionary.