A Record of the Panmunjom Negotiations

The Korean War lasted more than three years, beginning on June 25, 1950. The Panmunjom negotiations began on July 10, 1951, and ended on July 27, 1953, with the signing of the armistice agreement. The talks were long and tortuous—fighting and talking by turns, on and off—and spanned more than two years, 747 days, making it the longest armistice negotiation in history.

Taking history as a mirror, this war on the Korean Peninsula should offer lessons to all who love peace. The Korean War differed from many earlier wars in the world: soon after it broke out, there were always two fronts, war and peace, and the two accompanied each other.

This book focuses on the peace talks front of the Korean War, with the military front as supporting background. It describes, at the macro level, the formulation of negotiating strategies by the great powers, the博弈 between war and peace among the parties involved, and the overt and covert maneuvering of the two major camps; and at the local and micro level, it describes the course of the negotiations, the sharp confrontations at the table, the negotiating skills that seized the initiative, and the details of how the negotiations coordinated with the military front and the battlefield with the talks.

The book vividly portrays our representatives Li Kenong, Qiao Guanhua, and others—their courage and finesse, their sharp verbal battles with opponents at the negotiating table, and their insistence on contesting every inch. It also intersperses recollections by other members of the Chinese People's Volunteers armistice negotiation delegation who personally took part in the talks, presenting the concrete circumstances of this military-diplomatic struggle to readers from different angles and perspectives.