The Cold War and the Origins of Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China

Book excerpt: In The Cold War and the Origin of Diplomacy of People’s Republic of China, Niu Jun offers a new analytical framework for understanding the Cold War and PRC’s diplomacy from 1949 to 1955. He sees it as an interactive historical process between the Cold War, China’s domestic transition from revolution to nation-building, and the revolutionary ideology in the minds of Chinese leaders and Chinese people. Niu Jun’s analytical framework sheds fresh light on the widely studied events of PRC’s diplomacy such as China’s alliance with the Soviet Union and confrontation with the U.S., military actions on the Korean Peninsula and in Indochina, settlement of the first Taiwan Strait crisis, development of nuclear weapons, and so on.