The Cairo Conference Of 1943

For four days in November 1943, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang Kai-shek met in Cairo to discuss the future of the war in the China-Burma-India Theater and plans for the ultimate defeat of Japan. This would be the first and last time that these leaders would meet. This book chronicles the Cairo Conference, the events leading up to the conference, and the consequences of the decisions, understandings and misunderstandings that resulted from the summit. The only book-length study of the subject, this text examines the enormous impact the conference had on the course of the war in Asia and post-war Sino-Western relations.

Though much has been written about the second and third encounters of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta and Potsdam, their first meeting at Teheran has been unaccountably neglected. This book sets out to repair that omission and bring to light the people and decisions that changed the course of history at Teheran. Setting all three conferences in the context of other key events in 1943, it shows shows how Teheran was, in may ways, the "turning point" of the war and reveals a critical and often neglected event in recent history.

Defeated by Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to Taiwan to establish a rival state, thereby creating the Two Chinas dilemma that vexes international diplomacy to this day. Hsiao-ting Lin challenges this conventional narrative, showing the many ways the ad hoc creation of this not fully sovereign state was accidental and serendipitous.

Negotiating China's Destiny explains how China developed from a country that hardly mattered internationally into the important world power it is today. Before World War II, China had suffered through five wars with European powers as well as American imperial policies resulting in economic, military, and political domination. This shifted dramatically during WWII, when alliances needed to be realigned, resulting in the evolution of China's relationships with the USSR, the U.S., Britain, France, India, and Japan. Based on key historical archives, memoirs, and periodicals from across East Asia and the West, this book explains how China was able to become one of the Allies with a seat on the Security Council, thus changing the course of its future. Breaking with U.S.-centered analyses which stressed the incompetence of Chinese Nationalist diplomacy, Negotiating China's Destiny makes the first sustained use of the diaries of Chiang Kai-shek (which have only become available in the last few years) and who is revealed as instrumental in asserting China's claims at this pivotal point. Negotiating China's Destiny demonstrates that China's concerns were far broader than previously acknowledged and that despite the country's military weakness, it pursued its policy of enhancing its international stature, recovering control over borderlands it had lost to European imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and becoming recognized as an important allied power with determination and success.

A broad-ranging study of the relationship between alliances and the conduct of grand strategy, examined through historical case studies.