Stilwell invariably referred to them, as he had to the Kuomintang in its early days, as Reds (interchanging it with “Rebs” in 1911), signifying revolutionaries. To a man named for a hero of Bunker Hill there was nothing inherently un-American about revolution. China had been in need of revolution for a long time, and to most Americans sympathetic to that need, the Communists appeared as modern Taipings. They were considered to be an energetic variety of progressives or, in a phrase of the time, “agrarian reformers” (once rendered by Stilwell as “agricultural liberals”), nor was this
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