Going back many, many years and having lived there as the Time Magazine correspondent and now i almost go every year but my publisher actually i finish my previous book and he gastight take a year and write about it. I started to look through years and i thought about 1938 as an interesting year is in china, 1944, the year that Joseph Stilwell was kicked out of china and barbara took care of that topic forever. So i started to look at 1945 through the end of world war ii and a few months after world war ii. A and i realized to thing is. One, it was a good topic, and whenever watershed moment as well as chinese history but i like to think of this book as more American History than chinese history. And number two, the was a certain prevailing conventional wisdom about what happened at that time. I thought i would write a book that would substantiate that conventional wisdom that i would just write it in a very readable way to bring this incredible cast of characters to life but i wouldnt