At the end of the Pacific War Chiang Kai-shek’s government sought an alliance with Moscow, principally to ensure Soviet recognition and to limit the cooperation between Soviet and Chinese communist forces in Manchuria. At this point Stalin calculated that the communists could not win a civil war with the nationalists, and he was greatly concerned about the implications for Soviet national interests of the American commitment to the nationalists. Indeed, part of his reason for establishing a buffer zone across northern China was to make provision against a China that would be liked to America in ways envisaged by Roosevelt’s wartime planners. Hence he urged Mao to put aside armed struggle and enter a coalition government with Chiang Kai-shek. 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.