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Mao's Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War; 1950-1953. By Shu Guang Zhang. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. xiv, 338 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-7006-0723-4.)
The Communist side of the Korean War was long the dark side of the moon. Jian Chen's China's Road to the Korean War (1994) a breakthrough work, definitively analyzed Beijing's reasons for intervening in Korea in the context of the new Chinese Communist government's domestic and international priorities. Shu Guang Zhang's study, likewise based on extensive recently available Chinese documentation, provides a succinct military history of the Korean War from beginning to end told from the Chinese side. It is a very useful supplement to William Stueck's The Korean War: An International History (1995), which is weak on the Communist side. Zhang's conceptual framework is the...