Download A Force So Swift: Mao, Truman, and the Birth of Modern China, 1949 AudioBook Free
A gripping narrative of the Truman administration's respond to the fall of Nationalist China and the triumph of Mao Zedong's Communist pushes in 1949 - a fantastic political revolution that continues to condition East Asian politics even today. In the starting a few months of 1949, US President Harry S. Truman found himself confronted with a looming diplomatic catastrophe - "perhaps the greatest that this country has ever before experienced", as the journalist Walter Lippmann put it. Throughout the planting season and summer months, Mao Zedong's Communist armies fanned out across mainland China, annihilating the rival troops of America's onetime ally Chiang Kai-shek and taking control of Beijing, Shanghai, and other major metropolitan areas. As Truman and his aides - including his shrewd, ruthless secretary of state, Dean Acheson - scrambled to formulate a reply, they were pressured to contend not only with Mao but also with unrelenting politics enemies at home. Over the course of this tumultuous 12 months, Mao would fashion a fresh revolutionary authorities in Beijing, laying the building blocks for the creation of modern China, while Chiang Kai-shek would flee to the island sanctuary of Taiwan. These incidents transformed American international policy - leading in the end to years of friction with Communist China, a long-standing US dedication to Taiwan, and the next wars in Korea and Vietnam. Drawing on Chinese language and Russian resources as well as just lately declassified CIA documents, Kevin Peraino tells the story of the remarkable 12 months through the sight of the main element players, including Mao Zedong, President Truman, Secretary of Status Acheson, Minnesota congressman Walter Judd, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the important first lady of the Republic of China. Today, the legacy of 1949 is more relevant than ever before to the connections between China, america, and the rest of the world as Beijing asserts its cases in the South China Sea and tensions experience between Taiwan and the mainland.
