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But his expressed willingness to put his troops under American command was pure public relations. “We shall never agree to that,” Mao cabled Zhou in Chungking on January 25, 1945, and his reason harked back to Lenin’s theory of imperialism. It would put the party’s troops “under foreign command, turning them into a colonial army,” Mao said. America was the imperialist power, the Soviet Union the revolutionary one. And that is what mattered when it came to distinguishing between permanent friends and permanent enemies.
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