"The Americans, in a doomed attempt to make both sides co-operate, demanded the right to send a fact-finding group to Mao Tse-tung’s headquarters in Yenan. The ‘Dixie Mission’arrived in July and was favourably impressed, as Mao intended them to be. Severely limited in what they could see and whom they could speak to freely, they had no idea of Mao’s determination to destroy the Nationalists completely, nor of the savage purges, ‘rooting out traitors within the [Chinese Communist Party] and enforcing Maoist ideology throughout the party ranks’. A reign of terror was established by mass rallies where suspects were denounced, with slogans and insults screamed at them. Confessions were extracted through physical and psychological torture and brainwashing. Mao’s regime, with its obsessive use of thought control and ‘self-criticism’, proved even more totalitarian than Stalinism. Mao did not use a secret police. Ordinary citizens were compelled to take part in the witch-hunts, torture and murder of alleged traitors. And Mao’s personality cult exceeded that of Stalin."
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