>>514678154
They literally fought against the nationalists more than they fought against the Japanese, despite being in a formal alliance with the nationalists against the invaders. They were just opportunists hiding in the mountains while the Japanese ravaged their populace, then swept in with shiny new Soviet tanks once Japan surrendered.
It's a genuine US policy failure (and more broadly a failure to understand eastern politics) that the US chose to not take an active role in the "civil war" and never even considered that the Maoists were puppets of the USSR who would be supplied to fight a proxy war. We were all very fortunate that Mao stabbed Stalin in the back, because a chinese puppet state would have made all of Asia into the Soviet's backyard.
