China and the superpowers

All three were close allles during the Second World War, and though the alliance survived the war, It has not survived the peace. Their inter relations always as changeable and complex as the Interactions of three planets in space, moving in relation to one another under the Influence of mutual attraction and mutual repulsion allke-are similarly closely related to the Internal developments of each of them. From the Introduction

At the end of the Second World War the world's largest country, Its most populous and its richest were victorious allies. Since then relations between these three giants have been relati extremely tense, threatening at times to extreme explode in a nuclear disaster. Their collective history has largely determined the course of world events over the past forty years. It has been a history fraught with sudden shifts and dramatic turnabouts. The Soviet Union was the first to recognize the People's Republic of China in 1949. A decade later the two countries were in open dispute over everything, from Ideology to national boundaries. Perhaps most startling of all, In 1972 a Republican US President astonished the world by sitting down to a Chinese banquet in Peking.

Roy Medvedev's latest book takes a balanced view of the geopolitical. Ideological and economic interests which both divide and unite these three great powers. Though a famous dissident historian, his book is more than a history. Against the background of the changes wrought in China's external relations by the death of Mao Zedong and the rapid succession of Russian leaders since the death of Brezhnev,