China's road to the Korean War: the making of the Sino-American confrontation

New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. — xii, 339 p.
ISBN 0–231–10024–8.This study retraces China’s road to the Korean War with insight gained from recently released Chinese materials. It argues that China’s entry into the Korean War was determined by concerns much more complicated than safeguarding the Chinese-Korean border. To comprehend China’s decision to enter the war, one must first examine the CCP leaders’ perception of China’s security interests and their judgment of to what extent and in which ways such interests had been challenged during the Korean crisis. This examination requires an extended analysis of a variety of basic factors shaping the CCP leadership’s understanding of China’s external relations. Among these factors, the most important ones include CCP leaders’ perception of the outside world and China’s position in it, the nature and goals of the Chinese Communist revolution and their impact on the CCP’s security strategy and foreign policy, the influence of the CCP’s domestic policies on the party’s foreign behavior, and the leverage of historical-cultural factors (such as the Chinese emphasis of the moral aspect of China’s external relations, Chinese ethnocentrism, and Chinese universalism) upon Mao and the CCP leadership