IN THE opening months of the Korean War, one of the bloodiest conflicts ever fought between communist forces and the democratic West, China’s leader, Mao Zedong, cabled his fellow tyrant, Josef Stalin, with thoughts about the deaths that each side needed to suffer. My “overall strategy”, Mao wrote in March 1951, involves “consuming several hundred thousand American lives” in a war lasting years. Only then would the imperialists realise that, in the newly founded People’s Republic of China, they had met their match. Mao had already sent armies of “volunteers” to the Korean peninsula, where combat had raged since the previous summer, after a Soviet-sponsored regime in northern Korea invaded South Korea, ruled by an American ally. Coolly, Mao told Stalin that China expected to lose 300,000 more men to death or maiming.