The “long peace” is a term coined by Yale professor and Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis in his 1987 book The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War. It refers to the fact that, from the end of World War II in 1945 into the 1980s, more than 40 years passed without a third world war between the United States and Soviet Union. For centuries before 1945, great powers fought destructive general wars such as the Napoleonic Wars , World War I and World War II roughly once every generation. During the Cold War, people in the camps led by the two superpowers were preparing for a hot war: an all-out world war III. The real long peace is China’s peaceful rise that began in 1978, when Beijing started its “reform and opening up” period.