THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA later development.In addition,Chinese journalist Yuan Xi(1999)has advanced a negative assessment.According to Yuan,the United Nations,the United States,and U.S.Western allies did not intend to fight with China in 1950,and had tried to avoid a conflict.Since war was not imminent,China suffered huge losses in blood and treasure needlessly.Yuan implies that China's decision to fight in Korea was wrong because it had entirely negative consequences for the Chinese people.Yuan's conclusions were so unconventional that Chinese scholars,veterans,and even ordinary readers rallied together to attack him.Qi Dexue(2000),a noted PLA military historian,presented powerful reasons for viewing the Korean War's impact on China as overwhelmingly positive.It washed away 100 years of national humiliation and thereby advanced the greatest interests of the Chinese people.It consolidated the new Communist regime and thus assured China's future development.It assisted the Korean people's resistance against aggression and thereby enhanced China's world status.It preserved a peaceful environment for China's economic development, reinforced national defense,and accelerated the PLA's modernization program. Shen Zhihua(2000),however,doubtless presents a more balanced evaluation.On the one hand,he explains,China's participation in the Korean War restored its great power status.China soon played an important role in the Geneva and Bandung conferences in 1954 and 1955 respectively.It thus gradually eliminated the sense of humiliation Chinese had endured since the First Opium War(1839-1842).The CCP's leadership was consolidated politically at home.But on the other,China's participation in the war,especially the PRC's rejection of the UN cease-fire resolution in January 1951,caused anxiety and fear among China's Asian neighbors.China thus became fully entangled in the Cold War,which the Soviet-American quarrel had caused.The Korean War accentuated Mao's revolutionary impulse,pushing China more deeply onto a confrontational course with the United States. According to Shen,all of these factors had a very negative effect on China and its people. Several less studied subjects also have received scholarly attention in the last 10 years. Shen Zhihua(2003/2004,2009)has examined China's relations with both the Soviet Union and the DPRK early in the Korean War and also Sino-North Korean discord during the conflict.David Cheng Chang(2011)explores the struggles inside the POW camps,attempting to answer the question of why most Chinese Communist POWs chose exile on Taiwan rather than retuming to mainland China.Although Russian sources seem to indicate that the Chinese charge of American guilt in practicing germ warfare was false(Weathersby 1998, Leitenberg 2000),Chinese scholars(Chen 2008,Qu 2008,Qi 2010)continue to argue that the United States employed biological weapons against Chinese and North Korean forces during the Korean War. Release of new primary source materials will largely determine future directions in the study of China's role in the Korean War.For instance,scholars still have no access to several key documents.These include minutes of private conversations between Stalin and Kim Il Sung in Moscow during April 1950,discussions between Stalin and Zhou Enlai at the Black Sea on October 11,1950,and CCP Secretariat and Politburo meetings that same month.It is possible that these documents do not exist.In the early days of the PRC,Mao personally controlled his communications with the Soviet Union.Since a file management system was not fully in place,many key documents simply were not preserved.In addition, to maintain secrecy,there was a ban on minute keeping at many CCP high-level meetings. Likewise,Stalin,in his later years,prohibited the taking of minutes at sensitive meetings with foreign leaders.Neither Stalin nor Mao left memoirs.Complete answers to several key questions therefore remain elusive,most notably if Chinese leaders ever received U.S.signals regarding the possible use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War and whether President Dwight D.Eisenhower's nuclear threats played any role in Beijing's decision to 67