“These people were former Nationalist soldiers who had fought under Chiang Kai-shek,” Lee later said. “They did not parrot the usual boring Communist propaganda.” What really motivated them, he learned—and, according to them, what motivated their most devoutly Communist comrades, too—was the sense that they were “defending the border, the frontier, from the aggression of foreign imperialists,” Lee said. “You heard hardly a word about Communism, or Stalin, or Lenin, or even Mao. They considered our coming to the border a genuine threat to the motherland.”
