In the opening months of 1949, U.S. President Harry S. Truman found himself faced with a looming diplomatic catastrophe--"perhaps the greatest that this country has ever suffered," as the journalist Walter Lippmann put it. Throughout the spring and summer, Mao Zedong's Communist armies fanned out across mainland China, annihilating the rival troops of America's one-time ally Chiang Kai-shek and taking control of Beijing, Shanghai, and other major cities. As Truman and his aides--including his shrewd, ruthless secretary of state, Dean Acheson--scrambled to formulate a response, they were forced to contend not only with Mao, but also with unrelenting political enemies at home. Over the course of this tumultuous year, Mao would fashion a new revolutionary government in Beijing, laying the foundation for the creation of modern China, while Chiang Kai-shek would flee to the island sanctuary of Taiwan. These events transformed American foreign policy--leading, ultimately, to decades of friction with Communist China, a long-standing U.S. commitment to Taiwan, and the subsequent wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Drawing on Chinese and Russian sources, as well as recently declassified CIA documents, Kevin Peraino tells the story of this remarkable year through the eyes of the key players, including Mao Zedong, President Truman, Secretary of State Acheson, Minnesota congressman Walter Judd, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the influential first lady of the Republic of China.

Today, the legacy of 1949 is more relevant than ever to the relationships between China, the United States, and the rest of the world, as Beijing asserts its claims in the South China Sea and tensions endure between Taiwan and the mainland.

KEVIN PERAINO is a veteran foreign correspondent who has reported from around the world. A senior writer and bureau chief at Newsweek for a decade, he was a finalist for the Livingston Award for foreign-affairs reporting and was part of a team that won the National Magazine Award in 2004. His first book, Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power, was named one of the Daily Beast's best books on President Lincoln, and Foreign Affairs magazine called it "an important step toward a richer and more useful understanding of the American past." His second book, A Force So Swift: Mao, Truman, and the Birth of Modern China, 1949, will be released in September 2017. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and Politico Magazine. A graduate of Northwestern University, a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a visiting scholar in the international relations department at New York University, he lives in Connecticut with his wife and children. Follow him on Twitter @KevinPeraino. (Photo: Gasper Tringale.)