His cadres were winning peasant support through agrarian reforms and the murder of anyone who opposed them

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 104.

“Following Japan’s abrupt surrender, Chiang used stranded Japanese soldiers to assert his authority throughout coastal China, while despatching his own best troops to seize urban centres in Manchuria ahead of the Communists. This race saw the first fighting of a civil war which would cost a further three million Chinese lives. Although it claimed to be neutral, the US helped Chiang redeploy his forces in one of the greatest airlifts of all time, in which half a million Chinese troops were flown north in US transport planes.7 The Soviets turned over to Mao’s forces prodigious quantities of Japanese weapons, as well as Japanese instructors to help establish a Red Chinese air force. Two hundred thousand North Korean troops were loaned to Mao, who could also avail himself of northern Korea for strategic depth, as Chiang’s armies pressed him in Manchuria. It created a sense of obligation on Mao’s part towards Kim Il Sung, who was otherwise a servile Soviet client.

Since neither Mao nor Chiang wanted the sole responsibility of plunging China into a civil war hard on the heels of fourteen years of genocidal conflict with Japan, they made a stab at negotiations. Mao undertook the first flight of his life – he deemed it ‘very efficient’ – to the Nationalist headquarters at Chongqing, although he took along the US Ambassador as a precaution against assassination. Despite superficial cordiality, these talks achieved nothing, since Mao refused the absorption of his forces into a national army. Nor would he cede control of key provincial administrations in the north, where his cadres were winning peasant support through agrarian reforms and the murder of anyone who opposed them.

The situation became far too complex for Ambassador Hurley, who flew home and resigned in a blaze of self-publicity, convinced that China had been betrayed by Communist sympathizers in the State Department or by those liaising in Yan’an with Mao. This stance sat oddly with his own recent flirtations with Moose Dung, but played well with domestic right-wingers at a time when the Chinese Communists had just murdered an American Baptist missionary and OSS officer called John Birch after he unwisely tried to test the resolve of some juvenile cadres at a roadblock (they shot him).

This is part of why I enjoy Burleigh so much - his deep knowledge of complex circumstances while maintaining the capacity to make small notes along the way.

I have heard of the John Birch Society much of my life. Some mysterious deeply secret group of anti-communists. Known of but not known anyone with direct knowledge of. I assumed John Birch was some anti-communist politician. To discover he was a Baptist Missionary in China is something of a surprise.