China's Road to the Korean War

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.

Between November 1950 and the end of fighting in June 1953, China launched six major offensives against UN forces in Korea. The most important of these began on April 22, 1951, and was the largest Communist military operation of the war. The UN forces put up a strong defense, prevented the capture of the South Korean capital of Seoul, and finally pushed the Chinese back above the 38th parallel. After China's defeat in this epic five-week battle, Mao Zedong and the Chinese leadership became willing to conclude the war short of total victory. China's Battle for Korea offers new perspectives on Chinese decision making, planning, and execution; the roles of command, political control, and technology; and the interaction between Beijing, Pyongyang, and Moscow, while providing valuable insight into Chinese military doctrine and the reasons for the UN's military success.

"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.

Explains how the Chinese Army drove MacArthur and the U.N. forces out of North Korea, and tells why the Chinese decided to intervene.

China’s mid-twentieth-century wars pose extraordinary interpretive challenges. The issue is not just that the Chinese fought for such a long time—from the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 1937 until the close of the Korean War in 1953—across such vast territory. As Hans van de Ven explains, the greatest puzzles lie in understanding China’s simultaneous external and internal wars. Much is at stake, politically, in how this story is told. Today in its official history and public commemorations, the People’s Republic asserts Chinese unity against Japan during World War II. But this overwrites the era’s stark divisions between Communists and Nationalists, increasingly erasing the civil war from memory. Van de Ven argues that the war with Japan, the civil war, and its aftermath were in fact of a piece—a singular process of conflict and political change. Reintegrating the Communist uprising with the Sino-Japanese War, he shows how the Communists took advantage of wartime to increase their appeal, how fissures between the Nationalists and Communists affected anti-Japanese resistance, and how the fractious coalition fostered conditions for revolution. In the process, the Chinese invented an influential paradigm of war, wherein the Clausewitzian model of total war between well-defined interstate enemies gave way to murky campaigns of national liberation involving diverse domestic and outside belligerents. This history disappears when the realities of China’s mid-century conflicts are stripped from public view. China at War recovers them.

The Korean War was, years before Vietnam, the first great East-West military misadventure, eventually engaging sixteen countries under the U.N. flag in war against China and North Korea. Enter the Dragon examines the Chinese side of the Korean War for the first time, re-creating and dramatizing Communist China's reluctant role in the undeclared war against the U.S. in Korea. Russell Spurr's military classic is drawn from firsthand recollections of observers and participants on both sides, and focuses on six pivotal months, beginning in August 1950, when China first deliberated intervention, through their first strike in October, to the standstill at the end of January 1951.Based on five years of research and over 20 fact-finding trips to the People's Republic of China and Korea, Enter the Dragon describes why China became involved in Korea and how its strategy evolved, and recreates life on the front lines, conference rooms, and in the streets of the embattled cities. Spurr discovers a growing underground movement among the Chinese to re-evaluate their position in the Korean War, and contends that had the U.N. forces, led by General MacArthur, stayed on their side of the parallel, China would not have joined the North Korean action.