"This is a history of the creation of China's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and Mao Zedong's attempt to end the civil war with the conquest of key offshore islands. The civil war had been fought with a peasant army, yet to complete the consolidation of power and pursue its rivalry with Nationalist China, Mao had to develop maritime capabilities. Drawing extensively from newly available Chinese-language sources, this study shows that the navy-building process, the sea battles, and the contested landings on offshore islands had a lasting influence. Even today, the PLAN's identity, strategy, doctrine, and force structure are conditioned by these early experiences and myths. By providing the definitive account of this little-known, yet critical, moment in China's naval history, this book overturns the conventional wisdom that the People's Republic of China was inattentive to naval affairs during the early years"--

Toshi Yoshihara is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and an adjunct professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. He was previously the John A.van Beuren Chair of Asia-Pacific Studies at the US Naval War College and coauthored Red Star over the Pacific: China's Rise and the Challenge to US Maritime Strategy.