ABSTRACT
In 1949, a little over a quarter of a century after its birth, the CommunistParty of China won the ancient capital city of Beijing. A movement had become a government. The defeated Kuomintang was reduced to the island of Taiwan where its leader Jiang Kaishek, like the last of the Ming emperors 300 years earlier, clothed himself with imperial pretences reminiscent of the French nobles and Italian bankers who wandered round western Europe in the later Middle Ages calling themselves emperors of Byzantium. The new lord of China, Mao Zedong, was able to declare in January 1950 with only slight exaggeration that all China was his except Tibet.
