“China’s Communist Party went through a cycle of views on America, usually tied to Moscow’s party line.
In the early 1930s, the party’s Central Committee issued circulars referring to America as an enemy and casting it in the role of Japan’s enabler.
When Stalin switched gears in late 1935 and declared Fascism the greatest threat, Mao Zedong fell into line, calling for a united front with Chiang Kai-shek to counter the Japanese.
Liu Shaoqi, one of China’s top Communists, even acknowledged the US was helping China against Japan.
But as Stalin sought to make nice with Hitler, the party shifted again.
In August 1939, Mao backed the Soviet Union’s nonaggression pact with Germany and accused Roosevelt of being no better than Hideki Tojo, the prime minister of Japan.
The Communists accused America of plotting to hand China over to Japan.
When Japan and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact in April 1941, Mao privately praised the accord because it meant Japan could devote more troops to crushing Chiang Kai-shek, thereby paving the way for Communism’s victory in China.
On March 15, 1941, as Roosevelt vowed to turn America into an “arsenal of democracy” and aid China in its fight against Japan, China’s Communist press labeled him a “warmonger.
Then on June 22, 1941, Germany invaded Russia.
The Soviets ordered China’s Communists to cooperate with the Nationalists and stop criticizing the United States.
Roosevelt, a “warmonger” in April, became an “enlightened bourgeois politician” in June.
Zhou Enlai, the Communist representative in Chongqing, informed John Paton Davies, a State Department officer on Stilwell’s staff, Communist troops would be proud to follow General Stilwell.
In August 1942, he requested the United States dispatch an official American delegation to Communist territory in northwestern China.
Zhou wrote to Lauchlin Currie, lobbying for an equal share of Lend-Lease supplies.
American dignitaries traveling to China were now routinely praised in the pages of the party’s Liberation Daily.
Communist documents make it clear, however, the praise was tactical.
Aid from the United States and Britain must be “utilized to the fullest extent possible,” one memorandum issued in late 1942 read, but only the Soviet Union was a genuine ally.
As Mao had written in one of his most important essays, “On New Democracy,” “all imperialist powers are hostile to us.”
Only the Soviet Union could be trusted.”
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