Word: communist
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...said the State Department, Chiang conceded little and always too late: the official record depicts him as a leader whose wisdom was corrupted by power, his reason corroded by fear. He balked at the zealous U.S. envoys who urged and arranged negotiations with Communist leaders. As he became ever more stubbornly sure that Chinese unity could be won only by whipping the Red armies in battle, U.S. advisers from General Marshall down ever more firmly warned he could not win. They still thought China should make a deal with the Communists. Dead set against any deal of the kind, Chiang...
Then there was garrulous Ambassador Pat Hurley reporting to Washington:"The Communists are not in fact Communists; they are striving for democratic principles." (That was a judgment made in wartime. But Hurley soon changed his mind, fought hard and successfully against State Department officials who wanted to arm the Communist "agrarian democrats...
From the U.S. embassy in Chungking came a series of reports and recommendations which sounded fantastically gullible when set against today's knowledge of Communist General Mao's fealty to Moscow. Arms must be given to the Red forces, it was urged, "to hold the Communists to our side instead of throwing them into the arms of the Soviet Union." Another Foreign Service officer hailed the Communist revolution as "moderate and democratic," giving the people "democratic self-government, political consciousness and a sense of their rights." As far back as 1944 one embassy report flatly declared the Communists...
...answer that was no answer at all. The U.S., he said, was "to encourage in every feasible way the development of China as an independent and stable nation"; it was to stand firmly "opposed to the subjection of China to any foreign power." Moreover, warned the Secretary, if Communist China tried aggression against its Asiatic neighbors, then we "would be confronted by a situation violative of the principles of the United Nations Charter." Pressed to translate this wind into any language meaning action, Acheson was evasive...
...nation of peasants-become-freeholders, a nation slowly learning how to make the best of its position "at the end of the queue" of Europe. For the present, however, he strikes a balance: " [We] have no nightingales, but also have no serpents; no moles, also no ballet; no Communist intelligentsia, but also no Catholic intelligentsia...