So many influential Americans were souring on the Nationalists that Nathaniel Peffer estimated in the New York Times Magazine in May 1944 that “a majority would favor our shifting our support from Chungking to the Communists.” Mao’s chronicler Edgar Snow used his bully pulpit in the Saturday Evening Post to urge a new policy toward China. “Sixty Million Lost Allies” read the headline on Snow’s article in June 1944. He wanted America to embrace the Red Army and dump Chiang Kai-shek. Snow painted a utopian picture of the Red Zone—democracy, free universal education, happy peasants—and a hellish
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