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Clarke resistance circle during the occupation. Another member of the group was Emily Hahn, later the wife of Charles Boxer. Relationships between this left-wing branch of the Guomindang, with their strong Communist connections, and key figures in the British establishment may shed more light on the relations between the British and the Communists.
When the War Office authorised the creation of a Chinese Machine Gun Unit, it pondered where the men for this group would come from. Who did they call on for advice? None other than Rewi Alley, the journalist who had lived in Yenan and knew the Chinese Communists well.xxii He even went so far as to suggest that the War Office consult a Communist guerrilla leader from the north on setting up the unit, and recruiting men from China. This was tantamount to establishing, in Hong Kong, a unit of left-influenced fighters. Even more significantly, the unit was designed specifically to be a Chinese unit with minimal British input. The first batch of trainees were supposed to form an elite officer corps in what eventually might be an all-Chinese unit. The War Office was prepared to go along with this idea and detailed Chauvin, who had set up the wireless network, to organise the unit. This was in line with SOE's record of training and arming local men for a resistance and sabotage role, although the details of the training these men received is unknown, and officially they were a 'machine gun company.' By this stage, SOE had two separate guerrilla training units in China itself: the Danish Commando Company staffed by Danish businessmen under cover of Danish neutrality, and another force known as Mission 204, a much larger-scale and better-established organisation created to assist specifically in the Chinese war effort and operate in the hinterland of Shanghai. Chauvin was able to recruit and train fifty men for this Chinese battalion. Whether he used men with Communist leanings or men recruited through his contacts with KMT guerrillas is unknown. Photographs of the passing-out parade of the unit show that they were unusually tall men, possibly northerners. Unfortunately, they graduated from their training barely a week before the Japanese attacked.
Just as war is an extension of politics, so is politics essential for the continuance of war. In a situation like Hong Kong, the political aspects of resistance were even more complex than in other places because of the proximity and the supremacy of China. No amount of intelligence gathering and sabotage skills would have counted without