Mister, We could use a man like Owen Lattimore again

It's not your grandfather's Communist Party in China;

CHINA’S leadership has issued guidelines advising universities to strengthen their ideological work in classrooms.

The State Council document told professors that they should champion Marxism, traditional culture and socialist core values.

The official Xinhua news agency reported that the guidelines issued on Monday by top officials within the Communist Party and the government’s powerful State Council required that ideological work should be treated as central and strategic in the country’s education system.

We guess they miss the U.S. State Department's China Hands--John Stewart Service, John Paton Davies, John Carter Vincent--as well as non-Johns like Sol Adler, Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, Frank Coe, as well as free agent adviser Owen Lattimore. Who wrote an article for the Overseas News Agency (Sept. 1946, after George C. Marshall's mission for Mao had failed) which reads, in part;

The Kuomintang [our wartime ally Chiang Kai-shek] are the war party in China. They have had monopoly control over the Chinese Government, and they do not want to negotiate, because real negotiations would lead to a compromise, and a compromise would mean surrender of some of their monopoly privileges. They would rather fight, but they know they cannot fight successfully without continuing American aid. Therefore they must try to see-saw between pretended negotiations and experimental use of military power until, if possible, they have persuaded American public opinion that the Communists are a stiff-necked generation of vipers who have no intention of ever being reasonable. Then, they hope, the Americans will finally get mad and tell the Kuomintang to go the limit, with full American backing.

The Communists are the peace party in China. The Chinese who are actual Communist party members, together with the regular Communist military forces, are not strong enough to fight a civil war on their own. They survive only because they have the support of millions of people who are not Communists. These people do not want civil war; they long for peace. They will not fight to protect the Communists. They will fight only to defend their own rights and interests. They are backing the Communists only because they fear the Kuomintang more than they fear the Communists.

[Bold in the above by HSIB]

No, the Chinese Communists today are on their own, as the Comrades at Morning Star: The People's Daily ruefully note;

The recent focus on continuing intensified work reflects the thinking of a document leaked last year that outlined the Chinese Communist Party leadership’s top perceived threats.

Known as Document Nine, it warned of “Western anti-China forces” and unhealthy criticism that “appears in public lectures, seminars, university classrooms, class discussion forums, civilian study groups and individual publications.”

Not like in the good old days when they could count on their foreign friends.