ABSTRACT
Mao Zedong’s disapproval of the ‘imperialist war’ was expressed mainly in terms of the increased likelihood of a Far Eastern Munich. The first stage of the imperialist war, Mao explained, had begun in 1931 with the Japanese invasion of China’s north-eastern provinces. The market for contradictions among the imperialist powers from which China could benefit had in any case shrunk considerably after the outbreak of the European war. The United States was an imperialist power but not a colonial one. Neither did the Soviet propagandists pursue the doctrine of imperialist war to that logical limit which Mao continued to predict for it as he had done before it began – to the death of capitalism and the triumph of national liberation. He linked the anti-fascist struggle against Germany intimately with the anti-Japanese war, calling for Britain and America to give economic and military aid to China just as they should rush tanks and aeroplanes to the Soviet Union.
