A Force So Swift: Mao, Truman, and the Birth of Modern China, 1949 Audiobook (Free)

New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • Champion of the 2018 Truman Book Award

A gripping narrative from the Truman Administration’s response to nov Nationalist China as well as the triumph of Mao Zedong’s Communist forces in 1949–an extraordinary political revolution that continues to form East Asian politics to this day.

In the starting weeks of 1949, U.S. Chief executive Harry S. Truman found himself faced with a looming diplomatic catastrophe–‘perhaps the best that in regards to a Force Therefore Swift: Mao, Truman, as well as the Birth of Modern China, 1949 this country has ever experienced,’ as the journalist Walter Lippmann put it. Throughout the springtime and summer time, Mao Zedong’s Communist armies fanned out across mainland China, annihilating the rival troops of America’s one-time ally Chiang Kai-shek and acquiring control of Beijing, Shanghai, and additional major metropolitan areas. As Truman and his aides–including his shrewd, ruthless secretary of condition, Dean Acheson–scrambled to formulate a response, they were compelled to contend not merely with Mao, but also with unrelenting politics enemies in the home. Over the course of this tumultuous yr, Mao would style a new groundbreaking government in Beijing, laying the building blocks for the creation of contemporary China, while Chiang Kai-shek would flee to the isle sanctuary of Taiwan. These events transformed American foreign policy–leading, eventually, to years of friction with Communist China, a long-standing U.S. commitment to Taiwan, and the next wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Drawing on Chinese language and Russian sources, as well as lately declassified CIA docs, Kevin Peraino tells the story of this exceptional season through the eye of the main element players, including Mao Zedong, President Truman, Secretary of Condition Acheson, Minnesota congressman Walter Judd, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the influential first lady of the Republic of China.

Today, the legacy of 1949 is normally more relevant than ever to the interactions between China, the United States, and the rest of the world, while Beijing asserts its claims in the South China Ocean and tensions endure between Taiwan as well as the mainland.