Founding of the People's Republic of China

The Founding of the People's Republic of China was officially marked in Peking on October 1, 1949, bringing into being a Communist nation of more than 500 million people—about one fifth of humanity. In the book’s account, the inauguration made the scale of the political change impossible to overlook and sharpened the sense that the postwar world was entering a new phase.

International Context

The announcement came a week after news that an atomic explosion had occurred in the Soviet Union. The end of the United States’ four-year atomic monopoly had already intensified Cold War fears; the establishment of the world’s most populous Communist nation followed as another consequential change in the international balance.

Aftermath and Significance

The book links the new political landscape to a rapid reassessment of the nuclear threat. Later in October, highly secret meetings at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission turned to the prospect of a thermonuclear weapon with more than ten times the destructive power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Russian atomic bomb had changed the situation, participants believed, and the possibility of a more powerful weapon could no longer be treated as remote.