The topics of World War II and US-China relationship have been of much interest to academics and general pubic alike. This book challenges the conventional wisdom that has been produced on the topics over the past 50 years and offers the readers a new and balanced treatment of the topics. The scope of book covers all the major political-military events from the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941 to the victory over Japan in August 1945.

The scholarship in this subject area has long suffered from one serious flaw, i.e., unbalanced treatment. Although the leading works in the English language have aspired to conform to high professional standards, their intrinsic limitation is that they have only consulted English language materials, but have virtually failed to consult Chinese language materials. This phenomenon is unsatisfactory since wartime US-China alliance was a highly complicated "bilateral" relationship which can only be adequately narrated and analyzed by taking into account both countries' data and perspectives. This book addresses this glaring deficiency by employing a large amount of original Chinese source materials, but also by discovering a considerable amount of new English language materials as well as subjecting other often-used English materials to a close scrutiny.

This book enables the readers to take a completely fresh look at that important period of US-China relations.

Hsi-Sheng Ch'i was born in mainland China, received his high school and college education in Taiwan and graduated from Tunghai University. He obtained his PhD in political science from the University of Chicago, specializing in international relations and comparative politics.

He joined the faculty of political science at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) in 1967, and served concurrently as the chairman of UNC's East Asian Studies Curriculum. He took early retirement from UNC in 1990 to participate in the founding of the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST), served as the founding head of its social science program and dean of Humanities and Social Science School. He retired from the HKUST in 2002.

He has published several monographs with Stanford University Press, University of Michigan Press, Academia Sinica (Taiwan), on the subjects of Chinese warlord politics, the Nationalist party and government, Deng Xiao-ping's reform policies, as well as American-Chinese diplomatic relations.