The Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program is pleased to host China’s three leading diplomatic historians for a discussion about the history and present day relevance of China’s Cold War-era relations with North Korea and the Soviet Union. The event, featuring speakers Dr. Zhihua Shen, Dr. Danhui Li, and Dr. Yafeng Xia, will mark the release of two path breaking books: A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, and Sino-North Korean Relations, 1949–1976, and Mao and the Sino–Soviet Split, 1959-1973: A New History.
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Before the Chinese Communist Party took power, China lay broken. Today it is a force on the global stage, but remains haunted by the past. Sulmaan Wasif Khan chronicles the grand strategies pursued by China’s paramount leaders: Mao Zedong, who unified the country and kept it whole; Deng Xiaoping who dragged that country into the modern world; Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, cautious custodians of Deng’s legacy; and the powerful, insecure Xi Jinping. Despite the costs, China’s grand strategies have been largely successful. But success brings significant challenges—ones ever more pressing in the twenty-first century.
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After a decade of vigorous borrowing from the Soviet Union—advisers, factories, school textbooks, urban plans—Albania’s party clique switched allegiance to China during the 1960s Sino-Soviet conflict, seeing in Mao’s patronage an opportunity to keep Stalinism alive. Author Elidor Mëhilli shows how socialism created a shared transnational material and mental culture—still evident today around Eurasia—but it failed to generate political unity. Combining an analysis of ideology with a sharp sense of geopolitics, he brings into view Fascist Italy’s involvement in Albania, then explores the country’s Eastern bloc entanglements, the profound fascination with the Soviets, and the contradictions of the dramatic anti-Soviet turn. Mëhilli’s fresh perspective on the Soviet-Chinese battle for the soul of revolution in the global Cold War also illuminates the paradoxes of state planning in the twentieth century.
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Why did the United States move from a position of nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1960s to one of nuclear parity under conditions of mutual assured destruction in 1972? The story of this transition both sheds new light on the Cold War and offers new insights for today’s nuclear challenges.
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Author Pierre Asselin, the Dwight E. Stanford Chair in the History of US Foreign Relations at San Diego State University, will discuss his book that offers a North Vietnamese perspective of the Vietnam War. Asselin draws on two decades of research in Vietnamese archives to relate the communist Vietnamese experience and its role in the outcome of the war.
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In Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920-2015, author Mel Leffler’s wide-ranging essays explain how policymakers shifted their focus from balancing economic imperatives at home and abroad to a preoccupation with safeguarding America’s core values of democratic capitalism. While assessing U.S. policymaking from World War I to the present, he also interrogates the evolution of his own scholarship. Over time, he married elements of revisionism with realism to form a unique synthesis that uses threat perception as a lens to understand the making of national security policy.
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