Sulmaan Khan's study examines China's grand strategy, defined as the way the country's leaders marshal different forms of power to pursue national objectives. Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Xi Jinping are accorded separate chapters, with Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao sharing one. The treatment of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders is approving, even verging on the poetic: “All was chaos and misery [in pre-1949 China]. And yet beneath it all you could see something moving: a broken civilization's stirrings to restore itself” (p. 12). According to Khan, “Mao believed it was in the countryside that China's beating heart was to be found” (p. 13). Mao is credited with a high degree of prescience: the reader will find little of the experimentation and revision of strategies that have characterized previous studies of Mao, summarized by the late Benjamin Schwartz as “Mao groping toward Maoism.” Khan's Mao is little concerned with...

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