History, whether written by academics or popular writers, is usually delivered in easily recognizable chunks with familiar faces – the Pacific War, the Korean War, the Chinese Revolution, etc. But it is often the links between events that tell a more coherent story. Hans van de Ven, professor of Modern Chinese History at Cambridge University, has successfully provided these as he sees China through the almost continuous wars it faced between the Japanese invasion in 1937 and up to the Korean War stalemate reached after China’s intervention in. Korea from late 1951.