Preface

The National Intelligence Council is pleased to issue this collection of over seventy National Intelligence Estimates on China—the largest such release ever made at one time. This recently declassified collection represents the most authoritative assessments of the United States Government and thus constitutes a unique historical record of a momentous era in China's modern history.

The collection spans the pivotal period from the Chinese civil war and the consolidation of the Communist regime through the upheavals of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. It chronicles the struggles within the top leadership, the buildup of the Chinese military, and the evolution of the Sino-Soviet split. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now study the assessments of these developments with a degree of historical perspective, while still feeling the excitement of reading "history as it happens."

The collection was truly a collaborative undertaking. The editors of this volume did a masterful job of selecting and editing the documents to be included. Robert Suettinger drew on his experience in the intelligence, policy, and scholarly worlds to write a superb introduction. Within the National Intelligence Council, Mathew Burrows and his analytic and production staff expertly turned the raw documents into a finished book, which we unveiled at a major international conference held in partnership with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and its Cold War International History Project. Finally and most importantly, the volume was made possible by the contributions of a whole generation of analysts and senior officers from the many agencies of the United States Intelligence Community.

 

Ambassador Robert L. Hutchings
Chairman, National Intelligence Council

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