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The “Agrarian Reformer” Myth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Kenneth E. Shewmaker
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Extract

Much nonsense has been written about the “agrarian reformer” myth. A retired American diplomat maintains that the agrarian reformer slogan was a clever artifice devised by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to mask its intentions and affiliations. Allen Dulles, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has gone a step further. He contends that One of the most successful long-range political deceptions of the Communists convinced gullible people in the West before and during World War II that the Chinese people's movement was not Communistic, but a social and “agrarian” reform movement. This fiction was planted through Communist-influenced journalists in the Far East and penetrated organisations in the West.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 34 , June 1968 , pp. 66 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1968

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References

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51 For illustrations of this shift in analysis see:Snow, , People on Our Side (New York: Random House, 1944)Google Scholar;“Sixty Million Lost Allies”, The Saturday Evening Post, CCXV1 (10 06 1944), pp. 12–13, 44, 46Google Scholar; “Must China Go Red?” ibid. CCXVII (12 May 1945), pp. 9–10, 67–68, 70.

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