It was a muggy evening in Chongqing, (1) the wartime capital of Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist government. Chiang was dining with the new Chinese ambassador to Mexico, when the meal was interrupted by the news of the Japanese Emperor's radio broadcast, a broadcast announcing Japan's decision to accept the Allies' terms of surrender. On its face, this announcement was good news for Chiang. He had been dealing with Japanese aggression for nearly a decade and a half, first in the annexation of Manchuria in 1931, then in outright war since 1937. But the Japanese were not Chiang's real enemy; to him they were only "a disease of the skin." His real nemesis--what he referred to as China's "disease of the heart" was the Communist Party under the leadership of Mao Zedong. The surrender would rid China of over one million Japanese soldiers, but in doing so it would also create a vacuum that would be filled either by Chiang's Nationalists or Mao's Communists. Herein lay Chiang's problem: Mao's army of nearly one million was located in and around Japanese-occupied areas, areas that practically dominated the entire 2,000-mile eastern coast of China. As such, the Communists were in a better position than the Nationalists (or Guomindang, GMD for short) to receive the forthcoming Japanese surrender, but to Chiang, Mao's armies were nothing more than a dangerous group of "bandits." Making matters worse, the bulk of Chiang's armies were scattered as far as 700 miles away from key Japanese strongholds and were in no position to accept the surrender that came so abruptly.
