World Notes History

By late 1950 Kim Il Sung had been routed. Four months after his army invaded the South, the North Korean leader had fled his capital of Pyongyang as American-led U.N. forces pressed toward the border of the newborn People's Republic of China. Within a few weeks, though, Chinese "volunteers" poured into Korea and turned the tide of war, prolonging it for 2 1/2 years and keeping Kim's communist stronghold intact.

What happened? For many years, historians believed that Stalin had given Mao Zedong marching orders. Now comes the first official evidence that Mao acted on his own in the interests of national defense. Smuggled to the West, a collection of Mao's secret telegrams from 1950 appears to vindicate scholars who have long argued that Beijing sought to repel what it feared was U.S. encroachment. Otherwise, Mao warns in one message, "the American invaders will run more rampant" and encourage "the arrogance of reactionaries" in China. Stanford historian Gordon Chang says the cables show how many signals were missed by a couple of powers that behaved "like two men in a dark room."