China was split into two political entities after 1949. The “great divide” of modern China, however, cannot be understood only in terms of the civil war resulting from antagonistic ideologies and political forces. Rather it must be situated in the global context, as part of the emergent Cold War politics. Any “narrative” about the Chinese national divide in 1949 cannot be complete without addressing the global perspective. This paper is divided into two parts. Part I deals with how a conventional narrative about the civil war and the consequent national slpit buy focusing on two war novels, one about “guading Yan’an” and the other “guarding Kinmen”. Whereas Yan’an was treated as the mecca of communist revolution, Kimen symbolizes the bastion for a crusade to reclaim the lost Mianland. However, my discussion will reveal how the two topos underwent metamorphosis in literary recreation, which in its own turn was affected y historical contingencies. Part II deals with fictional narratives drawn from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Japan. I argue that the war as fought and/or narrated in these spaces compels us to rethink the rationale of the master narrative based on the China/Taiwan split. Beyond Yan’an and Kinmen, we must look into how the mid-20th century Chinese experience about war and diaspora was shaped by a far more complex Sinophone experience, therefore working toward a more contested discourse on Chinese geopolitical dynamics in the modern century.