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China's Road to the Korean War: the Making of the Sino-American Confrontation. By CHEN JIAN. Columbia University Press, 1994. ill, 352 pp. $37.50.
Chen Jian's China's Road to the Korean War is a welcome addition to the existing literature on the Korean War in particular- and on Sino-American relations in general.
Drawing largely upon significant new information made available in Mao's and Peng Dehuai's military writings, numerous memoirs of both Chinese and former Soviet leaders deeply involved in making critical decisions on the Korean War, and the author's interviews with those familiar with the events, the book sheds new light on why and how Chinese leaders made a crucial series of decisions that led China to enter the Korean War. In so doing, the book clarifies many ambiguous and controversial points in previous works on the same topic.
Rejecting the widely held view that China's intervention was compelled by Stalin as a part of a worldwide revolutionary strategy, or was caused by the imminent threat to the physical security of Northeastern China posed by the UN forces reaching the Yalu River, Chen cases the Chinese decisions in a broader context than has so far appeared in Korean War literature.
According to Chen, a combination of three factors led China to the critical decision: 1) evolutionary nationalism, which viewed any external hostility even to the regime's domestic policy programs as a threat to its own national securely; 2) its self-imposed mission to promote an Asian or even a world revolution modeled after its own revolutionary experiences; and 3) its determination to maintain the inner momentum and dynamics of the Chinese revolution.
Once China's national security interests are defined in such broad terms, the Sino-American conflict appears to have been almost unavoidable from...