Harold M. Tanner

This is military history as process as the author, in the course of telling the story of the campaign, examines how Lin Biao and his cadres converted a rag-tag guerrilla force into a conventional army capable of breaking the best forces the Chiang Kai-Shek had to commit to action. Besides transcending the stereotypes that attend to conventional Western understanding of the Chinese way of war, Tanner is also concerned with the struggles down to the current day to create a usable past from these events. He also does not shirk considering how the Communist methods of social mobilization contained within them the seeds of future political tragedies, whatever their contribution to the ultimate Communist victory. Highly recommended.… (meer)