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A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung and Sino-North Korean Relations, 1949–1976 By Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 376 pp. $65.00 (cloth).
Shen Zhihua is China's leading historian of China's relations with other socialist nations, and a number of his works are available in English. Two, counting this one, are co-written with Yafeng Xia. In this work, they have culled Russian/Soviet, Albanian, Bulgarian, German, Hungarian, South Korean, US, and Chinese archives and carried out interviews with some key participants and knowledgeable insiders, including former general secretary Jiang Zemin, to tell what is likely to stand for a long-time as the definitive work on Chinese–North Korean relations during Mao's reign.
One could argue that the book is mistitled. (Indeed, the publicity materials provided by Columbia University Press state the subtitle of the book is Mao, Kim and the Myth of Sino-North Korean Relations.) What Shen and Xia reveal is that there was very little friendship between China and North Korea and between Mao and Kim. There were some periods of comradely respect and relations, but overall the relationship was characterized by miscommunications and opportunistic uses of each other. Expectations of what the other would provide were often unfilled, yet perceived necessity drove the two together regularly. Much of the tenor of the Chinese–North Korean relationship was in fact informed by what each wanted from a third party, often the Soviet Union, but also the US in the 1970s. In this, Shen and Xia definitely refute the view of the “lips to teeth” close relationship between the two communist states and parties. Arguably the period of closest relations between the two was the period between 1945 and the start of the 1950s. From...