About the Author

Odd Arne Westad is a University Reader in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Among his many books is Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945-1963 (Editor) (Stanford and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1998

Reviews

"Offers meticulous research, drawing on classic reports, recent memoirs, and scholarship in Chinese, Russian, and English based on archival research... More important, [Westad] weaves a grand, sweeping epic of social, cultural, and economic conflict that includes but goes beyond political and military battles... Highly recommended for academic libraries and collections in Chinese history." - Library Journal "This remarkable survey of a crucial period of Chinese history deserves to be widely read." - Choice "This book is of fundamental importance to understanding twentieth-century Chinese history, comparative revolution, and early Cold War history. Weaving together strands of military, social, political, and international history, Westad provides by far the best empirically grounded, multi-archival, and comprehensive nationwide analysis of how the Chinese Communist Party achieved victory in the Chinese Civil War of 1946-1950." - Journal of Cold War Studies "Odd Arne Westad has written a key work on the civil-war period as well as an essential bibliographic starting point for further research." - The China Journal "Decisive Encounters is a highly readable, comprehensive, and reliable account of a war whose importance we all know but which nonetheless has received little attention." - PACIFIC AFFAIRS