A rigid Communism was not seen as the replacement, and the reason why it was not was that few believed the Chinese Communists were “real” Communists. This negative assumption was derived from the syllogism that while Communism was known to be a bad thing, it seemed to operate in many ways as a good thing in China; therefore it could not be orthodox Communism. The difficulty was resolved by referring to its proponents, as did the President and Captain Carlson in an exchange of letters at this time, as “so-called Communists.”*
