China 1949: Year of Revolution
GRAHAM HUTCHINGS
(BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC, 336 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064

The Chinese Communist Party will this year celebrate the centenary of its founding congress in Shanghai. Among the 13 representatives at that meeting was a 27-year-old farmer’s son from the landlocked province of Hunan, Mao Zedong. Twenty-eight years later, backed by a party with nearly four million members and a vast army which had crushed its Nationalist foes, he would ascend the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing to proclaim the birth of the People’s Republic of China.

That year of triumph, which changed the global balance of power, is the focus of Graham Hutchings’ well researched and elegantly ­written study. The prelude to 1949 was one of upheaval, from the warlord cliques to the Japanese invasion and the civil war between the Communists under Mao and the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. The postlude saw a radical remoulding of Chinese society, the catastrophes of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and the liberation by Deng Xiaoping of an economy which now challenges its American rival for size.

Two striking characteristics of that pivotal year were the scale of military operations and the swiftness of the Communist victory. It is estimated that more than five million soldiers were engaged in a theatre spread over thousands of miles. At the start of 1949, the CCP controlled less than half the Chinese land mass. Twelve months later, the PRC had come into being, the Nationalist government had fled to Taiwan and Mao was on his way to Moscow to meet Stalin and forge a formal state-to-state alliance.