A Power So Swift: Mao, Truman, and the Start of Fashionable China, 1949

New York Occasions Guide Evaluation Editors’ Alternative • Winner of the 2018 Truman Guide Award

A gripping narrative of the Truman Administration’s response to the autumn of Nationalist China and the triumph of Mao Zedong’s Communist forces in 1949–an extraordinary political revolution that continues to form East Asian politics to at the present time.

 

Within the opening months of 1949, U.S. President Harry S. Truman discovered himself confronted with a looming diplomatic catastrophe–“maybe the best that this nation has ever suffered,” because the journalist Walter Lippmann put it. All through the spring and summer time, Mao Zedong’s Communist armies fanned out throughout mainland China, annihilating the rival troops of America’s one-time ally Chiang Kai-shek and taking management of Beijing, Shanghai, and different main cities. As Truman and his aides–including his shrewd, ruthless secretary of state, Dean Acheson–scrambled to formulate a response, they had been pressured to contend not solely with Mao, but in addition with unrelenting political enemies at residence. Over the course of this tumultuous yr, Mao would style a brand new revolutionary authorities in Beijing, laying the inspiration for the creation of contemporary China, whereas Chiang Kai-shek would flee to the island sanctuary of Taiwan. These occasions remodeled American international policy–leading, finally, to many years of friction with Communist China, a long-standing U.S. dedication to Taiwan, and the following wars in Korea and Vietnam.

 

Drawing on Chinese language and Russian sources, in addition to just lately declassified CIA paperwork, Kevin Peraino tells the story of this outstanding yr by the eyes of the important thing gamers, together with Mao Zedong, President Truman, Secretary of State Acheson, Minnesota congressman Walter Judd, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the influential first girl of the Republic of China. 

At the moment, the legacy of 1949 is extra related than ever to the relationships between China, the US, and the remainder of the world, as Beijing asserts its claims within the South China Sea and tensions endure between Taiwan and the mainland.