Gokhale, the preeminent Indian interpreter of China and a gifted historian, delivers a pithy contribution to understanding how India navigated its early relationship with communist China. The book’s focus is unusual and interesting. It examines the ways in which India became entangled with a peculiar competition: the tensions between the United Kingdom and the United States on how to deal with China after the Communist takeover in 1949. They disagreed over formally recognizing the People’s