Odd Arne Westad is a professor of history at Yale University and has a distinguished record of publication on East Asian history and politics and the Cold War. This new work is based on the Edwin O Reischauer Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 2017. Such lectures generally fall into two categories. They either present a piece of ground-breaking research in an accessible form or, as Westad does here, provide a valuable and wide-ranging assessment of a particular subject.

The China–Korea relationship has puzzled the West since at least the 18th century. While Korea seemed to be a separate political entity from China, those wishing to trade or have another form of involvement with the country soon came up against an obstacle. Koreans insisted that they could not do