driven by anything beyond a widespread sense of anti-Japanese anger, although he did note that the Nationalists had undertaken cooperative movements and county-level reforms. But Johnson did not agree that American assistance to China should be predicated on wholesale political reform by the Nationalists. Chiang was determined to fight the Japanese, and the US should support him in that endeavor. In a remarkably prescient comment, Johnson observed: It is my view that since the fall of the Manchu dynasty and the collapse of the traditional Chinese concept of government the Chinese people have
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