New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • Winner from the 2018 Truman Book Award

A gripping narrative of the Truman Administration’s response to the fall of Nationalist China and the triumph of Mao Zedong’s Communist forces in 1949–an extraordinary political trend that is constantly on the form East Asian politics even today.

In the opening months of 1949, U.S. Chief executive Harry S. Truman discovered himself confronted with a looming diplomatic catastrophe–‘perhaps the greatest that about A Force Therefore Swift: Mao, Truman, and the Birth of Contemporary China, 1949 this nation has ever experienced,’ as the journalist Walter Lippmann put it. Throughout the spring and summer season, 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 other major towns. As Truman and his aides–including his shrewd, ruthless secretary of state, Dean Acheson–scrambled to formulate a reply, they were compelled to contend not merely with Mao, but also with unrelenting political enemies at home. Over the course of this tumultuous year, Mao would fashion a new innovative authorities in Beijing, laying the building blocks for the creation of contemporary China, while Chiang Kai-shek would flee to the island sanctuary of Taiwan. These events transformed American foreign policy–leading, ultimately, to decades of friction with Communist China, a long-standing U.S. commitment to Taiwan, and the next wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Drawing on Chinese and Russian resources, aswell as lately declassified CIA papers, Kevin Peraino tells the storyplot of this impressive calendar year through the eyes of the main element players, including Mao Zedong, President Truman, Secretary of State Acheson, Minnesota congressman Walter Judd, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the important first lady from the Republic of China.

Today, the legacy of 1949 is definitely more relevant than ever before to the associations between China, the United States, and all of those other world, as Beijing asserts its statements in the South China Ocean and tensions endure between Taiwan as well as the mainland.