Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Chungking and in some cases killed in toto, the tone of enthusiasm could not be squeezed out. The correspondents humanized the Communist leaders for their readers, telling how Mao had worked his way through school; how Kao Kang, chief of the Party’s Northwest Bureau, was the son of a poor peasant beaten to death by the bailiffs of a Shensi militarist because he had failed to pay the tax on his donkey; how Wang Chen, a “dashing brilliant” brigade commander, had once been a fireman on the Peking-Hankow Railway. They told of doctors, students, university teachers and former YMCA secretaries all working “at a high pitch for their country with the conviction that the ways adopted here are right.” In the fall when a second group of journalists came, they reported plentiful harvests and fruit in abundance, pears and grapes, pumpkins and tomatoes, buckwheat, millet, cotton and tobacco.