China's Road to the Korean War

Updated with maps, photographs, and battlefield diagrams, this special fiftieth anniversary edition of the classic history of the Korean War is a dramatic and hard-hitting account of the conflict written from the perspective of those who fought it. Partly drawn from official records, operations journals, and histories, it is based largely on the compelling personal narratives of the small-unit commanders and their troops. Unlike any other work on the Korean War, it provides both a clear panoramic overview and a sharply drawn you were there account of American troops in fierce combat against th.

This classic history of the Korean War—from its origins through the armistice—is now available in a paperback edition including a substantive introduction that considers the heightened danger of a new Northeast Asian war as Trump and Kim Jong-un escalate their rhetoric. Wada Haruki, one of the world’s leading scholars of the war, draws on archival and other primary sources in Russia, China, the United States, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan to provide the first full understanding of the Korean War as an international conflict from the perspective of all the actors involved. Wada traces the North Korean invasion of South Korea in riveting detail, providing new insights into the behavior of Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee. He also provides new insights into the behavior of Communist leaders in Korea, China, Russia, Eastern Europe, and their rivals in other nations. He traces the course of the war from its origins in the North and South Korean leaders’ failed attempts to unify their country by force, ultimately escalating into a Sino-American war on the Korean Peninsula. Although sixty-five years have passed since the armistice, the Korean conflict has never really ended. Tensions remain high on the peninsula as Washington and Pyongyang, as well as Seoul and Pyongyang, continue to face off. It is even more timely now to address the origins of the Korean War, the nature of the confrontation, and the ways in which it affects the geopolitical landscape of Northeast Asia and the Pacific region. With his unmatched ability to draw on sources from every country involved, Wada paints a rich and full portrait of a conflict that continues to generate controversy.

"Breaks new ground in analyzing China's decision to enter the war and its subsequent struggle to hold its own against the world's most powerful nation. Should stand for some time as the standard comprehensive treatment of China in the Korean War". -- William Stueck, author of The Korean War. "Offers provocative insights into Mao's thinking about strategy, tactics, and the human costs of warfare. Highly recommended". -- John Lewis Gaddis, author of The Long Peace.

Fought on what to Westerners was a remote peninsula in northeast Asia, the Korean War was a defining moment of the Cold War. It militarized a conflict that previously had been largely political and economic. And it solidified a series of divisions--of Korea into North and South, of Germany and Europe into East and West, and of China into the mainland and Taiwan--which were to persist for at least two generations. Two of these divisions continue to the present, marking two of the most dangerous political hotspots in the post-Cold War world. The Korean War grew out of the Cold War, it exacerbated the Cold War, and its impact transcended the Cold War. William Stueck presents a fresh analysis of the Korean War's major diplomatic and strategic issues. Drawing on a cache of newly available information from archives in the United States, China, and the former Soviet Union, he provides an interpretive synthesis for scholars and general readers alike. Beginning with the decision to divide Korea in 1945, he analyzes first the origins and then the course of the conflict. He takes into account the balance between the international and internal factors that led to the war and examines the difficulty in containing and eventually ending the fighting. This discussion covers the progression toward Chinese intervention as well as factors that both prolonged the war and prevented it from expanding beyond Korea. Stueck goes on to address the impact of the war on Korean-American relations and evaluates the performance and durability of an American political culture confronting a challenge from authoritarianism abroad. Stueck's crisp yet in-depth analysis combines insightful treatment of past events with a suggestive appraisal of their significance for present and future.

This book re-visits the history of the Korean War of 1950-1953 from a Chinese perspective, examining Chinese strategy and exploring why China sent three million troops to Korea, in Mao’s words, to “defend the homeland and safeguard the country”—giving rise to what became the war’s common name in China. It also looks into the relatively neglected historical factors which have redefined China’s security concerns and strategic culture. Using newly available sources from China and the former Soviet Union, the book considers how interactive the parameters of defense changes were in a foreign war against Western powers, how flexible Chinese strategy was in the context of its intervention, and how expansive its strategic cultural repertoire was at the crucial moment to “defend the country.” Providing a re-examination of China’s military decisions and strategy evolution, this text narrates the story of successive generations of Chinese leaders and provides a key insight into security issues in China and Northeast Asia today.

Traditional histories of the Korean War have long focused on violations of the thirty-eighth parallel, the line drawn by American and Soviet officials in 1945 dividing the Korean peninsula. But The interrogation rooms of the Korean War presents an entirely new narrative, shifting the perspective from the boundaries of the battlefield to inside the interrogation room. Upending conventional notions of what we think of as geographies of military conflict, Monica Kim demonstrates how the Korean War evolved from a fight over territory to one over human interiority and the individual human subject, forging the template for the U.S. wars of intervention that would predominate during the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. Kim looks at how, during the armistice negotiations, the United States and their allies proposed a new kind of interrogation room: one in which POWs could exercise their "free will" and choose which country they would go to after the ceasefire. The global controversy that erupted exposed how interrogation rooms had become a flashpoint for the struggles between the ambitions of empire and the demands for decolonization, as the aim of interrogation was to produce subjects who attested to a nation's right to govern. The complex web of interrogators and prisoners -- Japanese-American interrogators, Indian military personnel, Korean POWs and interrogators, and American POWs -- that Kim uncovers contradicts the simple story in U.S. popular memory of "brainwashing" during the Korean War