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
Only one. For a while i didnt think i was going to make it. Thank you all for coming. And again thank you to politics and prose for having me. One of kind of a standard tropes of publishing the book is that you have to answer the question why did you write about this topic in the first place. And you are supposed to a thoughtful answer about how youve had a lifelong interest in this topic and youve always dreamed about exploring it more deeply. In fact, this topic was supposed to be by my publisher. I have had a lifelong interest in china, almost a lifelong interest, having studied it studied chinese going back many many years and having lived there for a few years as the Time Magazine correspondent their, and traveled to there. Even today i go almost every year. But it was my publisher actually. I finished my previous book and he asked me to pick a year and write a book about in china. And so started looking through years, and i thought about 1938. Thats a very interesting year in chi