It was not until the autumn of 1947,
when the military position shifted in favour of the Chinese communists,
that Stalin accepted Mao’s claims that the communists would win and that the Americans would not be able to stop them.
Indeed , in January 1948 when Stalin made his famous admission to Milovan Djilas that he had been proved wrong by the Chinese communists,
he also noted that China was different from Greece and that America,
‘the strongest state in the world’ , would never let the communists win.