With us this Wednesday (July 15) is the distinguished historian Richard Bernstein, who will talk about his book China 1945: Mao’s Revolution and America’s Fateful Choice. As the Washington Post describes it: “Bernstein tells the story of the United States, China, Japan and the U.S.S.R. during the last, dramatic year of World War II in Asia. The central question he explores is this: In the late 1940s, could the United States and China have avoided four decades of antagonism, thereby allowing America to dodge the depredations of the Korean War, a defeat in Vietnam and, it is implied, our current tensions with Beijing?”

Bernstein studied Chinese history with the legendary John K. Fairbank at Harvard University before becoming one of the first American journalists to be stationed in the People’s Republic of China, opening the Time bureau in Beijing in 1980. He spent 25 years as a correspondent for the New York Times, for which he has reported from more than two dozen countries in Asia, Europe and Africa. His full-length postings have included the United Nations, Paris and Berlin. In between, he was the Times’ National Cultural Correspondent and a book critic.

A tour de force of narrative history, China 1945 examines the first episode in which American power and good intentions came face-to-face with a powerful Asian revolutionary movement, and challenges familiar assumptions about the origins of modern Sino-American relations. —Knopf

Wednesday, July 15, 7:30 pm

50RMB, 40RMB (members)