China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

Would the Cold War have unfolded differently in Asia if the United States had cultivated a closer relationship with the Chinese communist party during World War II? That is the primary question of Bernstein's (A Girl Named Faithful Plum) latest work. While America and China collaborated against Japan in the Second Sino-Japanese War, the relationship between the two countries deteriorated in 1945 when the United States lent support to Chiang Kai-shek, an anticommunist statesman who served as head of the Nationalist government in China from 1928 to 1949. Bernstein argues that this cooperation had major implications for America's later involvement in the Korean and Vietnam wars. He concludes that communist revolutionary Mao Zedong's steadfast devotion to Stalin's political ideology of Marxism-Leninism meant there was not much the United States could have done to prevent an acrimonious relationship with Chinese communists after World War II.